
Class. 
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COPYRIGHT DEPOSfT. 



BOOKS AND THINGS 



BY 



PHILIP LITTELL 



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NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 

1919 






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Copyright, 1919, by 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE. Inc. 



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THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY 
RAHWAY N J 



©CI. A5 3 5 18 2 



TO 

E. P. S. 



My thanks are due to the other editors 
of "The New Republic" for letting me 
print and reprint the follozving articles 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

sargent's wilson 3 

a little flag 5 

providence the wise 12 

the ideal campaigner 1 9 

when the augurs yawned 26 

" a road to yesterday " 35 

BRYAN 4 2 

SOMEWHERE IN HEAVEN 49 

ZEPPELINITIS 57 

VERDUN 64 

HEADMASTERLY 7 1 

DISCLOSURE DAY 80 

HENRY AND EDNA 89 

SAFETY IN NUMBERS Ill 

A DRY DINNER ... . . . . 120 

THE BONDAGE OF SHAW 1 27 

A SCHNITZLER STORY I4 1 

BELOW THE AVERAGE READER 1 48 

REVIEWING RUSSIA 155 

ANNA REVISITED l6o 

TENNYSON 1 67 

BROWNING 173 

MATTHEW ARNOLD l8o 

SWINBURNE 187 

" THE WAY OF ALL FLESH " 194 

AN IMMORTAL WRITER 201 

LATER GEORGE MOORE ...... ... . 208 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

henry james's quality 215 

" the middle years " 224 

richard the lion-harding 23o 

victor chapman's letters 2^7 

" the spirit of man " 244 

my new ulster 250 

acts of composition ...... 257 

forget it 264 

" LE PETIT PIERRE " . . • .«. ... • • 2jl 



BOOKS AND THINGS 



SARGENT'S WILSON 

AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM 

HE is leaning forward a little, with an arm 
on each arm of his chair. Neither hand 
is quite resigned to the situation, quite given up 
to the moment. In the left one, especially, we 
discover an impatience which we find again, 
somewhat more faded or more under control, 
in his face. These visitors whom we do not 
see, whom the painter has put us in the place 
of, did not this professor understand several 
minutes ago everything they could have to say 
of foot than their minds. Now he is ready to 
have them go, he is more than ready to turn 
his chair again to the table, where his docu- 
ments are and his heart is. Matter printed or 
typewritten is so much more orderly and in- 
words hot in the mouths of flesh and blood 
forming, so much less an interruption, than 
to him? Of course he did. His mind is fleeter 
intruders. 

What is he professor of? No narrow spe- 
3 



4* Books and Things 

cialty, surely. Those eyes, hard and cold al- 
though they can stare, on occasion, are evidently 
accustomed to liberal prospects. A habit of 
speaking to a listening world, from that part of 
his intellect which most resembles his heart, has 
saved his didactic lips from any such look of 
petulance as blind nature half intended them to 
wear. Perhaps his specialty is the future. Yes, 
that must be it. Mr. Sargent has shown us a 
Professor of the Future, whom a delegation 
from the present, the coarse present in which 
things are every day either done or left undone, 
has interrupted. When the present has picked 
up its hat and bowed itself out he will be relieved 
to be left alone again with the future. 

Januaby, 1918. 



A LITTLE FLAG 

PRESIDENT WILSON'S speech on Flag 
Day gave me two surprises. It revealed 
a likeness I had never suspected between the 
President's thinking and Mr. G. K. Chesterton's. 
" There are no days of special patriotism," says 
the President. " There are no days when you 
should be more patriotic than other days." A 
few sentences later the same thought is repeated 
in a slightly different form : " I am sorry that 
you do not wear a little flag of the Union every 
day instead of some days." Clearly the teach- 
ing of these two passages taken together is that 
Flag Day should not come once a year, but 
that every day should be Flag Day. Mr. 
Chesterton, in an essay called " Some Damnable 
Errors About Christmas," deals after this fash- 
ion with the second of the more obvious fallacies 
which the day has occasioned : " I refer to the 
belief that ' Christmas comes but once a year.' 
Perhaps it does, according to the calendar — a 
quaint and interesting compilation, but of little 
or no practical value to anybody. It is not the 

5 



Books and Things 



calendar, but the spirit of man that regulates 
the recurrence of feasts and fasts. Spiritually, 
Christmas Day recurs exactly seven times a 
week. When we have frankly acknowledged 
this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realize 
the Day's mystical and terrific beauty. For it 
is only every-day things that reveal themselves 
to us in all their wonder and their splendor. A 
man who happens one day to be knocked down 
by a motor-bus merely utters a curse and in- 
structs his solicitor, but a man who has been 
knocked down by a motor-bus every day of the 
year will have begun to feel that he is taking 
part in an august and soul-cleansing ritual." 

Later in the same essay, involuntarily con- 
tributed to Mr. Max Beerbohm's " Christmas 
Garland," Mr. Chesterton says that " what is 
right as regards Christmas is right as regards 
all other so-called anniversaries." Whether 
President Wilson would go as far as this I can- 
not know until I have collated his speeches on 
the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, 
Christmas, Easter Day, Saint Patrick's Day and 
Memorial Day. This I hope to do when the 
opportunities have presented themselves. If his 
thinking prove consistent and if his advice be 



A Little Flag J 

followed, the heart of America will lose some of 
that monotony which hostile critics have im- 
puted to it. You will readily allow me this 
prophecy if you suffer me to complete my quo- 
tation from President Wilson. " I am sorry," 
he said, " that you do not wear a little flag of 
the Union every day instead of some days, and 
I can only ask you, if you lose the physical 
emblem, to be sure that you wear it in your 
heart, that the heart of America shall interpret 
the heart of the world." And so it may come 
about, if what is right as regards Flag Day is 
right as regards all other so-called anniver- 
saries, that you will wear every day in your 
heart a little flag of the Union, a wreath of holly 
and a spray of shamrock. Every day instead 
of some days your heart will hold an Easter 
Egg in one hand and in the other, unless you 
incline to a safe and sane Fourth, a fire-cracker. 
Does a heart so profusely and variously deco- 
rated seem to you like a heart decorated against 
itself? No matter. Too quick despairer, be not 
discouraged. Learn to embellish your heart by 
adding now and then a fresh little physical 
emblem to its furniture. 

Surprise number two was the discovery that 



8 Books and Things 

I did not really understand President Wilson's 
meaning. Here, in a writer notably perspicuous, 
were simple words simply arranged, yet baffling 
somehow, and so subtly ! This surprise did not 
stay. I put it to flight by recalling a sentence 
from William Blake : " Nor is it possible to 
thought a greater than itself to know." Know- 
ing, however, that we progress by attempting 
the impossible, I did not give over the attempt 
to master the President's thought, but kept on 
striving, striving, until finally something light- 
ened the darkness — a suspicion that President 
Wilson, when he appeared to say he was sorry 
we Americans did not wear a little flag as fre- 
quently as we now wear skirts or trousers, 
didn't intend to be taken literally. What he 
would have us acquire is the high-motive habit. 
Many of us go through life without feeling 
patriotic more than a very few times. It is not 
patriotism which wars every morning against 
sluggishness, conquers it and yanks you out of 
bed. It is not patriotism which at breakfast 
leads you to reject that extra, ultimate, tor- 
porific griddle-cake, nor is it patriotism which 
lands you at the station in time to catch the 
7:51 for the city. Not by reference to a 



A Little Flag 9 

patriotism conscious of itself can we explain Mr. 
T. Cobb's batting average. 

This condition of things is one that President 
Wilson would gladly change. For an America 
in which men do their day's work from many 
and various and specialized motives he would 
substitute an America in which work is done 
from motives fewer and nobler. He believes 
that work is likely to be better done if the 
worker's motive is high. In President Wilson's 
mind human motives are arranged in a hier- 
archy, with patriotism near the top. To him 
the world would be not only a more admirable 
but a more interesting place if all men could 
acquire the habit of looking about them, select- 
ing the highest motive in sight, and then acting 
on it. To his mind there would be something 
congenial in the spectacle of such order and 
simplicity and uniform highmindedness. Such a 
world would at least be very unlike the existing 
world. It would be a little like a world of 
Woodrow Wilsons. For President Wilson is 
one of those exceptional men who act seldom 
upon impulse and mostly upon high motives 
carefully chosen. This consciousness of high 
motives is one explanation of his courage and 



io Books and Things 

his tenacity. When you are thoroughly con- 
vinced that your motives are right it is easier 
to believe that they must be impelling you along 
the right track. 

Now, having got what I can out of the Flag 
Day speech, I wonder how I could ever have 
thought it just a series of highminded, unmean- 
ing words. In appearance it is this, to be sure, 
but in reality it is self-revelation. " Save me, 
O Lord, from pumping into myself every morn- 
ing feelings which can in me be sincere only by 
accident or on a special occasion." The man 
who made that prayer does not resemble Mr. 
Wilson. To keep company with high motives 
is part of the President's daily life. They do 
not lose their power over him. With them he 
goes up to the high places where he makes his 
lonely decisions, and to their voices he listens. 
Every day he invites them to his table, the same 
guests always — Patriotism, Humanity, Justice, 
Duty and the others. Their host knows how to 
put these abstractions at their ease by making 
them feel that he is one of themselves. The 
table talk would have shocked Horace Walpole. 
Such words as " sacred " and " solemnize " are 
heard oftener than the taste of the eighteenth. 



A Little Flag n 

century would have approved. There is a sud- 
den hush at the table. The host is speaking, 
" When I think of the flag," he says, " it seems 
to me I see alternate stripes of parchment upon 
which are written the rights of liberty and jus- 
tice, and stripes of blood spilt to vindicate those 
rights, and then, in the corner, a prediction of 
the blue serene into which every nation may 
swim which stands for these great things." 
Nor do Patriotism, Justice, Humanity and Duty 
see anything to criticize in their friend's rhetoric. 
June, 1915. 



PROVIDENCE THE WISE 

MOST of the men I know best voted last 
autumn for President Wilson. Most of 
them did it after a good deal of hesitation, did 
it recalcitrantly, biased by reading and meditat- 
ing the speeches of Mr. Hughes. Nearly all, 
however, admired Mr. Wilson's addresses of 
February third and April second, although they 
would have liked them better yet if the Presi- 
dent had said " duty " instead of " plain duty," 
" frankly " instead of " very frankly," and if he 
had not said " proud punctilio." These excep- 
tions made, the speeches Mr. Wilson has lately 
been delivering do not arride these friends of 
mine, who are punctilious without being proudly 
punctilious, and meticulous not without being 
morbidly meticulous. Some of them read him 
with pain, others with a pleasure not free from 
malice. 

Attempts to explain their state of mind are 
all the harder for me because it resembles my 
own. I am talking, of course, about those men 
who are in nowise malicious. You suggest, per- 

12 



Providence the Wise 13 

haps, that each of them had in childhood an 
experience which predisposed him to distaste 
for Mr. Wilson's recent speeches? Yes, that is 
possible, certainly possible. I should not care, 
by calling it impossible, to range myself with 
those who go up and down the world always 
denying that the improbable has occurred. But 
is not the matter easier of access on the other 
side? Instead of trying to guess what Mr. Wil- 
son's mind is like by exploring their feeling 
about it, why not try to get at their feeling by 
taking a look at a bit of his mind? 

Let us choose, for this purpose, a passage 
where the substance attracts more attention 
than the words. Or else, if we are so unhappily 
constituted that such a passage is not so easy 
to find, let us disregard our sorrow that the 
President's vocabulary has lost so few female 
adjectives since the United States went to war, 
that the adjective is still the enemy of the 
executive. 

Perhaps this extract will do — from the ad- 
dress Mr. Wilson made last week to the United 
Confederate Veterans: "These are days of 
oblivion as well as of memory; for we are for- 
getting the things that once held us asunder. 



14 Books and Things 

Not only that, but they are days of rejoicing, 
because we now at last see why this great nation 
was kept united, for we are beginning to see 
the great world purpose which it was meant to 
serve. Many men, I know, particularly of your 
own generation, have wondered at some of the 
dealings of Providence, but the wise heart never 
questions the dealings of Providence, because 
the great, long plan as it unfolds has a majesty 
about it and a definiteness of purpose, an eleva- 
tion of ideal, which we were incapable of con- 
ceiving as we tried to work things out with our 
own short sight and weak strength." And 
again, a few sentences later: " At the day of our 
greatest division there was one common passion 
among us, and that was the passion for human 
freedom. We did not know that God was work- 
ing out in His own way the method by which 
we should best serve human freedom — by mak- 
ing this nation a great, united, indivisible, in- 
destructible instrument in His hands for the 
accomplishment of these great things." 

Such a passage is not the work of a mind for 
which a main attraction in difficult subjects is 
their difficulty. The doubt Mr. Wilson hoped to 
soothe is found tossing on its bed, with a tern- 



Providence the Wise l£ 

perature as high as ever, when he has finished 
his lullaby. His words are a soft answer to a 
hard question. 

Even comparatively simple questions are an- 
swered here with uncostly ease. Are we quite 
so certain, if we impute to Providence, as Its 
motive for deciding our civil war as It decided 
it, a desire to keep the United States united for 
military use in the present war, are we quite 
certain that the means were adapted to this end? 
Suppose the South had split itself off from the 
North, suppose each of these two nations, afraid 
of the other, had treated itself to a large stand- 
ing army. Suppose, finally, that the passion for 
making and keeping the world safe for democ- 
racy had burst upon these two nations at about 
the same time, and had risen high enough to 
wash each beyond fear of the other, and had 
swept both into this war. Might not the result 
have been that the southern states and the 
northern states would be less unready to-day for 
war than the United States is? This is not a 
certainty. Of course it isn't. It is a doubt 
which the President has called into being by his 
own freedom from doubt. 

Our fathers have told us that some minds seek 



Books and Things 



by preference the central difficulty of every sub- 
ject they attack. Other minds decline to see even 
the difficulties that are posted conspicuously 
upon the subject's circumference, like sentinels 
on its outer walls. We should have to put Mr. 
Wilson into this second class, I am afraid, if 
we were to judge him by nothing but what he 
said to the Confederate Veterans about Provi- 
dence. 

Don't question the dealings of Providence, he 
advised the Confederate Veterans. Wait until 
you can see in these dealings majesty, elevation 
of ideal, definiteness of purpose. Then approve. 
" The wise heart never questions the dealings of 
Providence." 

But this advice, as I discover by trying to fol- 
low it, makes me the judge of an ideal's eleva- 
tion and the definiteness of a purpose, me the 
appraiser of majesty. I may not like such an 
arrangement. I may happen to require, no 
matter how well I think of myself, a criterion 
more objective than my uncertain and fitful 
power to recognize these things when I see 
them. As a judge of God's purposes I leave 
something to be desired. Had I been address- 
ing the Confederate Veterans, say in late 1914 



Providence the Wise 17 

or early 191 5, I might have said to them, out of 
my blindness: " God kept the United States one 
nation so that it might serve, throughout this 
world upheaval with whose causes we have no 
concern, to remind the warring nations how 
beautiful and lofty that nation is which pre- 
serves and values the blessings of peace. By 
God's help united we stand," so I might have 
told my hearers, " and, in strict accordance with 
His design, united we stand out of this war." 
And to-day, seeing my error, now when the 
great, long plan has been further unfolded, I 
should perhaps be regretting that I had so pub- 
licly misjudged the purposes of God. 

President Wilson seems to imply that our 
later estimates of the dealings of Providence 
are always sounder than our earlier estimates. 
This, we may remember, was almost Monsieur 
d'Astarac's opinion of Providence's estimates of 
Itself. On an island in the Seine, one moonlit 
evening, he said to Jaques Tournebroche, who 
had left La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque to 
enter his service : 

" One cannot reproach Jehovah with having 
deceived himself as to the quality of his work. 
Although he saw that it was good, at the very 



1 8 Books and Things 

first and in the ardor of composition, he was not 
slow to realize his mistake, and the Bible is 
filled with expressions of his dissatisfaction, 
which amounted often to ill-humor and even at 
times to anger. Never did artisan treat the 
products of his industry with more disgust and 
aversion. He even thought of destroying them, 
and as a matter of fact he did drown all except 
a few." 
June, 19*7. 



THE IDEAL CAMPAIGNER 

NEITHER from his rather unusual name, 
which is Mullinub, nor from his good 
average face, which is red and round and opti- 
mistic, would you be likely to guess his tastes, 
which are all for cubism in plastic art, and in 
verse for Mallarme and Edward Lear. 

So you will readily understand that I, who 
have long known his likings, was surprised when 
he greeted me the other day with these words: 
" This campaign that Hughes is making is 
rather disappointing." Shielding my eyes from 
the pictures which ruin his walls I determined 
to improve the occasion. In a man like Mul- 
linub serious interests should be encouraged. 

" Ycu say well," I began. " There has been 
no disappointment like Mr. Hughes's campaign 
in my time. The hope which I took with me to 
his notification meeting died there before the 
evening was over. It did not want to die. Fed 
on rumors and hearsay for dessert, with faith 
and my desires as its staple food, it had grown 

19 



20 Books and Things 

marvelously throughout its short life. It was 
conceived when Mr. Hughes's success at Chi- 
cago began to look certain, it was born on the 
day of his nomination, it died before he had 
finished his first speech. For I had hoped that 
Mr. Hughes, supplied by God or nature with a 
stronger brain than any other Republican pos- 
sibility except Mr. Root, would tell me quite 
plainly what ought to have been the conduct 
of the United States since the outbreak of the 
war, would outline in large firm strokes an 
American policy, would separate the risks 
avoided by such a policy from those other risks 
which he would be willing to face and for which 
it was our business to prepare. 

" Yes, I acknowledge that I had such a hope. 
I did imagine once upon a time that Mr. 
Hughes was a stilled fountain of pure wisdom, 
eager for a chance to play. Like many hun- 
dred thousand Americans I had been perplexed 
in the extreme by the war. I longed for a leader 
who could see our American goal, our way to 
it, and the difficulties and dangers on our way. 
Well, Mr. Hughes has been doing his best to 
convince us all that such a picture had not the 
merit of likeness. It was the work of a painter 



The Ideal Campaigner 21 

who had dipped his brush in his wishes. Call 
no man wise until he has broken silence." 

Mullinub's face, while I was speaking my 
piece, changed from surprise, which it expresses 
easily, to disappointment, which it expresses 
with effort and in spite of obstacles. 

" I don't understand what you're driving at," 
he said. " What do you expect from a cam- 
paign, anyway ? " 

" As a citizen," I answered with dignity, " I 
either want a campaign to result in the doing 
of certain things or else I want it to teach me 
what things I want done." 

" Oh," said Mullinub. " I get you. So you 
are still at that stage of development? Perhaps 
I was just as bad before I grew up. Nowadays 
I am interested in campaigning as a fine art. 
Absolute music, absolute painting, absolute 
poetry, absolute campaigning — these are the 
things I go in for. In each of these arts I seek 
the master who can reduce the irrelevant and 
impertinent interest, the illustrative, represen- 
tative, informing, practical element, to a mini- 
mum. The greatest master would abolish it 
altogether. 

" It was years ago that I had my first glimpse 



22 Books and Things 

of an ideal toward which many candidates 
strove but which no candidate ever quite at- 
tained. It was then that I conceived my white 
and pure and stainless ideal, then that I first 
imagined a candidate who would take the stump 
and stay on it without saying anything about 
any subject upon which his opinion could con- 
ceivably be an occasion of curiosity to any son 
or daughter of woman. 

" Mr. McKinley in his first campaign might 
have reached this ideal. I still believe he was 
capable, if only he had had the right trainers 
and backers, of penetrating deep into the 
autumn months of 1896 without uttering the 
word gold — of avoiding this word for as many 
weeks as Mr. Hughes succeeded in avoiding the 
word Lusitania. But it was not to be. The 
gods couldn't see it. Mr. McKinley's trainers 
and backers would not let him be silent. He 
passed into the White House with one great 
possibility of his nature unfulfilled. 

" But at Carnegie Hall, where I went sadly, 
reluctantly, in obedience to major force, I was 
thrilled by Mr. Hughes's speech. Perhaps I had 
found my absolute campaigner after all these 
years of waiting. With trembling hands I took 



The Ideal Campaigner 23 

out my watch and timed the speaker. Half an 
hour of Mexico, untainted by any attempt at a 
clear statement of what he would have done if 
he had been President. Glorious! Ten minutes 
about the European war, and never a ray of 
light. Superb! My heart beat wildly. Perhaps 
here, before my eyes, where they had never ex- 
pected to find him, was a candidate who could go 
through a campaign without saying anything at 
all! 

" It seemed too good to be true and it was 
too good to be quite true. At the very end of 
the evening came his fall. He spoke of woman 
suffrage in words which though not unfor- 
givably clear could nevertheless mean only one 
thing. Too bad, too bad. And he might so 
easily have said even upon this subject some- 
thing that would not have damaged his record 
for noncommittalness. He might have said, pre- 
serving the same attitude toward woman suf- 
frage that he has taken and kept toward so 
many other questions, that women were en- 
titled both to all their existing legal rights and 
also to such other rights as might hereafter be 
given them by either state or federal action. 

"In what Mr. Hughes has said about the 



24 Books and Things 

tariff he has been equally untrue to his highest 
or most noncommittal self. And he could so 
easily have been true. He had only to say that 
our tariff laws ought to be framed with wisdom 
and enforced with firmness, to repeat this over 
and over, and to say no more about it. 

" Still, although he has not attained my ideal, 
his silence upon the important questions of the 
campaign has been gratifying, very gratifying. 
Perhaps he comes as near to being the ideal 
campaigner, the candidate who says exactly 
nothing, as imperfect man can come in this 
imperfect world. I do not count, as things 
which spoil the technique of silence, what Mr. 
Hughes has said about President Wilson's ap- 
pointments to the civil and diplomatic service. 
While the European war is on, while so many 
of my inartistic and practical fellow-countrymen 
are both dissatisfied with our national conduct 
and unable to say what it ought to have been, 
discussion of the Durand case, like discussion of 
the Brown, Jones and Robinson cases, is really 
a form of silence." 

"Then why are you disappointed?" I asked. 
" He has had least to say about the most impor- 
tant subjects." 



The Ideal Campaigner 25 

" Because of his slip about the Lusitania. He 
ought not to have been so definite. He spoke 
against his will, I admit, and after a wonderful 
delay, beautifully sustained. But I hope he 
won't do it again. Somebody in the crowd that 
heard him is said to have shouted ' you said 
something! ' These words must have made him 
realize, in bitterness, that he had fallen short of 
his ideal." 

October, 1916. 



WHEN THE AUGURS YAWNED 

BEING now an old man, and unlikely to live 
much longer in this world, I think fit to 
set down before I die certain things which took 
place forty years ago, in the autumn of 1916, 
and of which I am the only surviving witness. 

My readers may recall that year, by the help 
of any standard work of reference, as the date 
of a presidential election in this country, the 
candidates being a Mr. Wilson, the then incum- 
bent, and a Mr. Hughes. Until the middle of 
October the campaign had been an affair of 
good, average momentousness. Each candidate 
had been trotting with great decency round and 
round his appointed track. Mr. Wilson's gait 
was fluent and graceful. Mr. Hughes moved 
more stiffly and brought his feet down a little 
harder. 

At that time, long before the pure candidate 
law was enacted or even thought of, any candi- 
date was legally free to say that he contained 
nothing but undiluted Americanism, and each 

26 



When the Augurs Yawned 27 

did say so several times. By October such asser- 
tions had ceased to thrill and astonish the elec- 
torate. I would not, however, wish to convey 
the impression that the campaign consisted ex- 
clusively of repetitions of their faith in Ameri- 
canism by Mr. Hughes and Mr. Wilson. Mr. 
Hughes was fond of exciting his hearers by 
telling them it was not good for a government 
to vacillate in its policy, and that it was good for 
a government both in policy and administration 
to be adequate, consistent and firm. Mr. Wil- 
son was fond of promising that he would omit 
no word, and it was currently believed that 
among the words he was least in danger of 
omitting were humanity, justice, sacred, solemn 
and very. 

Well, the campaign ran along, not very fast, 
until about the middle of October, when some- 
thing happened which convinced everybody 
that each of the two candidates had gone clean 
off his head. 

Mr. Wilson, in a speech delivered at — the 
name of the town escapes me, but it was within 
a day's journey of the Mississippi River — Mr. 
Wilson up and admitted that his administration 
had made a mistake or two. To be specific, 



28 Books and Things 

says he, I have made mistakes. To be more 
specific, he says, after I saw that ad that the 
German Embassy put in the papers, I wish I 
had held the Lusitania at her pier until I had 
asked the German Embassy what about it. To 
keep on being specific, he says, I now think 
that piece I spoke about being too proud to 
fight was in the circumstances a damned silly 
thing to say. I ought to have known how peo- 
ple would take it. This is wisdom after the 
event, if you like, but it is better to be wise after 
the event than to be foolish all the time. 

This was bad enough, of course. No candi- 
date in the United States, since the time when 
Endicott Winthrop Adams first ran for reelection 
as hog-reeve in the suburbs of Plymouth, Mass., 
had ever admitted that he did wrong. And this 
was only half the scandal. On the very night 
when Mr. Wilson touched off this bomb, Mr. 
Hughes, speaking at another town within a 
day's journey of the Mississippi, up and admits 
that Mr. Wilson since he took office had once 
or twice spoken and acted like a grown man in 
his right mind. And anyhow, Mr. Hughes says 
in substance, the President has had one hell of 
a problem on his hands. " I am not prepared 



When the Augurs Yawned 29 

to deny," he says in substance and In part, 
" that if Mr. Wilson had done just after the 
Lusitania what he did just after the Sussex, and 
if the result had been a state of war between us 
and Germany, I am, I say, in a condition of un- 
preparedness to deny that the great undiluted 
mass of the American people, barring a few 
Easterners who live near the effete, patrician 
sea-coast, might not have liked it so well as 
they like what has actually occurred. Peace 
with honor was the first demand of the great 
American nation, but most of us, if we couldn't 
have peace with honor, were willing to compro- 
mise on peace with Germany." 

Men who are still alive remember the pande- 
monium or row that came next. The campaign 
stopped as if it had been shot. For twenty-four 
hours the candidates could not move hand, 
foot or eyelid. They had to be dug out of the 
landslide of protesting telegrams with steam- 
shovels. 

These telegrams taught Mr. Hughes and Mr. 
Wilson a thing or two. From that momentous 
moment neither of them had a good word for 
the other. Each candidate did his duty in that 
station of life into which it had pleased his con- 



30 Books and Things 

vention to call him. Each said just what he 
ought to say, which was what everybody knew 
he would say and had said before. 

This ancient history is old. The ancient his- 
tory I am now about to reveal is new. 

Perhaps you noticed that Mr. Hughes made 
his break within a day's journey of the Missis- 
sippi, and Mr. Wilson the same, but you did 
not notice, because I did not tell you, that these 
two towns were the same distance from the 
same place on the Mississippi, viz. : Prairie du 
Chien, Wisconsin. I know, for I had a shack 
on an island half way between Prairie du Chien 
and the Iowa coast over opposite. 

Well, about a week before the big scandal I 
heard a motorboat ticking toward my island, 
with me alone on it, and I went down to the 
shore, where two gentlemen were disembarking. 
" Mr. Paley," says one of them, " meet Mr. 
Herbert Parsons, if I have the name right," and 
then the other says, " Mr. Paley, I don't think 
you've met Colonel House." And then the two 
of them, as we walked up to my place, said 
could they have the loan of my shack one night 
next week for a great public purpose? 

What purpose? says I, and then it all came 



When the Augurs Yawned 31 

out. The campaign was slowing up, and these 
two had got together and decided that if the 
candidates could meet secretly, face to face, and 
properly dislike each other's faces, the words 
they would afterward say would put life and 
speed and ginger into the campaign. So I 
named my price for the loan of the shack and 
the thing was fixed up. 

At length the fatal night arrived. First a 
boat came over from the Iowa shore, grated on 
the gravel beach, and out stepped Mr. Wilson. 
Then came a boat from the Wisconsin shore, 
grated, etc., and out got Mr. Hughes, with an 
American flag in the buttonhole of his cutaway. 
He carried no other weapons. Neither did Mr. 
Wilson. 

The boatmen stayed by their respective 
boats and the candidates met in the main hall 
of the shack, fourteen by twelve. I withdrew 
to an adjoining room and listened through the 
wall and looked. 

Mr. Wilson led off. " I see," he says to Mr. 
Hughes, after smiling once at him, " that you 
are wearing a little flag of the Union in your 
buttonhole, and I can only ask you, if you lose 
this little physical emblem, to be sure that you 



32 Books and Things 

wear it in your heart, that the heart of America 
shall interpret the heart of the world." 

Mr. Hughes looked a little surprised, but he 
was at no loss for an answer. " We want 
America first in the mind and heart of every 
one in this land," he says. " When I say I am 
an American citizen I ought to say the proudest 
thing that any man can say in this world. 
There is one other thought I want to leave 
with you, and it is this: We are going to see 
that that is done which we are entitled to have 
done. There is one other thought I want to 
leave with you until called for, and it is this. 
Wherever " — and he glanced reverently down at 
his buttonhole — "wherever there is an Ameri- 
can flag there is a shrine." 

Mr. Wilson followed the direction of Mr. 
Hughes's eyes. " When I think of the flag," 
says he, "it seems to me I see alternate stripes 
of parchment on which are written the rights 
of liberty and justice, and stripes of blood spilt 
to vindicate those rights." 

" I dare say," says Mr. Hughes, " but I want 
to see splendid policies in this country. There 
is no such thing as prosperity or success for any 
particular class. We are not laborers or capi- 



When the Augurs Yawned 33 

talists in this country. Fellow-citizen, we are 
fellow-citizens." 

For about half an hour I looked and listened, 
and then voices, loud at first, got lower and 
lower. When silence fell I stole in to investi- 
gate. By saying to each other, the two of them 
in a room, the very things they had been saying 
at each other in public, each had put the other 
to sleep and it was my turn. 

When at last the renewed sound of their 
voices woke me up again I couldn't quite catch 
their drift. The candidates seemed to have 
agreed that perhaps they were boring the 
voters, and that something must be done. If 
the words of each produced sleep in the other 
how could the voters be expected to stay awake? 
Then Mr. Wilson said something about augurs 
who laughed being better than augurs who 
yawned and were the cause of yawning. Sud- 
denly both men jumped up. A light played all 
over Mr. Wilson's face and over those parts of 
Mr. Hughes's where there was room. " Let's 
try saying what we think," they shouted to- 
gether. " That'll shake 'em up." . . . 

It did shake 'em up, as I have told you, and 
as the historians have recorded the scandal. 



34 Books and Things 

From the row caused by Mr. Wilson's and Mr. 
Hughes's simultaneous bursts of candor, and 
from the things said in that row, I gathered at 
the time that if both kept on saying what they 
really thought neither of them could be elected. 
Nobody would have been elected President. 
Fortunately they stopped speaking their minds 
and somebody was elected, if I recollect rightly. 
But I am an old man, with an untrustworthy 
memory, so perhaps you had better consult a 
work of reference. 
August, 1916. 



" A ROAD TO YESTERDAY " 

MORE by design than by accident, a few 
seasons ago, I missed seeing " The Road 
to Yesterday." No play, so my argument ran, 
can live up to such a good title. What ought 
to be fanciful and irresponsible will probably be 
sentimental and coldly ingenious. Instead of fol- 
lowing a by-path into forgotten memories, in- 
stead of hearing whispers from the dawn of life, 
I shall find myself personally conducted along 
a highroad into a prettified epoch labelled, 
somewhat arbitrarily, the past. 

Whether I did well to stay away is more than 
I know, for no one has told me. But ever since 
the play left New York I've been rather hoping 
I might chance upon some such road — upon any 
road to yesterday — before old age closed all 
roads to to-morrow; and hoping, until just the 
other day, in vain. Last week I visited yester- 
day, not quite as I had intended, not casually, 
but by going deliberately to the Cleveland 
Memorial Meeting at the New Amsterdam 
Theatre. The past accumulated about me as 

35 



36 Books and Things 

the audience gathered. It was not such a pret- 
tified past as I had been afraid of. These men 
and women were mostly of my own or of a 
greater age. They looked high-minded, self- 
respecting, grave, rather drab. They resem- 
bled, if I may raise, for a moment, a disused 
phrase from the dead, those best thinkers who 
so abounded in 1884. From their faces you 
guessed that their minds were coeval with the 
mind of George William Curtis. 

The first of the three speakers whom Mr. 
Parker introduced was exactly the right man to 
talk to such an audience. So much was plain 
before Governor Harmon said a word, and his 
speech cut the impression deeper. He was 
thinking not of himself at all, but solely of the 
dead, of the friend he had loved, of the Presi- 
dent who deserved well of both party and coun- 
try, of Mr. Cleveland as " a commanding and 
permanent world-figure," destined as time went 
on to appear " more clearly and sharply, like a 
mountain seen at a distance after the clouds 
have rolled away." Like the other speakers, 
Governor Harmon was more concerned with the 
size of Mr. Cleveland's character than with its 
contours. His speech was a little dull, a little 



"A Road to Yesterday" 37 

like a catalogue, recited with piety and feeling, 
of dried issues and closed questions, a little 
unreal although quite sincere in its forgetfulness 
of the fact that there will be many competitors 
for the attention of posterity. 

To convince some of us and to remind others 
that Mr. Cleveland was a brave man, wise and 
ruggedly honest — one felt this to be the lonely 
motive of Governor Harmon's speech. No sense 
that his words interested you could tempt him 
to say more than he had come from Ohio to 
say, no sense that he was not interesting could 
have made him say less. The other two speakers 
struck me as not so single-minded. Their wish 
to do Mr. Cleveland honor was obvious enough, 
but Mr. McAdoo, not the former Secretary of 
the Treasury but the chief city magistrate of 
New York, was as obviously a gifted speech- 
maker enjoying himself, willing to go on and 
on, not quite willing to stop, taking too ap- 
parent a pleasure in his own unconcern and 
geniality. 

General Leonard Wood's speech left an im- 
pression not so easy to describe. His voice, 
heard just after Mr. McAdoo's and before we 
had had time to forget Governor Harmon's, 



38 Books and Things 

sounded very New England. It betrayed a 
youth spent among cultivated persons. His 
accent, which he learned early and uncon- 
sciously, and which is quite natural to him, 
seemed on this occasion too refined to be quite 
natural. He struck me as conscious of this re- 
finement, as rather disliking it, as rather afraid 
that it might be a handicap, and as having made 
a decision. I could not help imagining General 
Wood as having said to himself, once upon a 
time: "There is nothing to be done about my 
accent. To make it less refined, to try in any 
way to correct its New Englandism, would be 
affectation. But I am a soldier as well as a 
New Englander. May not a soldierly curtness 
of style lessen the prejudice caused by those 
marks which my early advantages have left on 
my accent?" Probably General Wood never 
said anything like this to himself. I am only 
supposing, and I put down my guess only be- 
cause it helps me to explain what I felt while 
listening to his speech, namely, that his was one 
of the best essays in military curtness, one of 
the best deliberate imitations of curtness, that 
I had ever heard. 

Of the three speakers General Wood seemed 



"A Road to Yesterday" 39 

the least disinterested. He too admired Presi- 
dent Cleveland, but a wish to do President 
Cleveland honor was far from being his sole 
motive. It was accompanied by the obvious, 
the altogether too obvious, wish to do Presi- 
dent Wilson harm. Dislike of President Wil- 
son, determination to seize all the good chances 
to score off him, dictated too many of General 
Wood's short, jabbing phrases. Once at least 
his ill-will toward the living incited him to the 
oddest mispraise of the dead. President Cleve- 
land, he told us, " was not an adept in the art 
of verbal massage. He went straight to the 
point." When General Wood thought of this 
last sentence he was not thinking of Mr. Cleve- 
land at all, for Mr. Cleveland found it very hard, 
whenever he took a pen in his hand, to go 
straight to the point. He hit off, it is true, a 
few quotable phrases, but they are very few. 
For the most part his writing is bad. It is 
solemn, longwinded, inexpressive, padded with 
the unhappiest circumlocutions. Neither think- 
ing nor writing came easy to Mr. Cleveland. 
His excellence lay elsewhere — in making deci- 
sions and sticking to them. 

All observers would agree, I suppose, if they 



40 Books and Things 

were asked to go over the list of Presidents since 
Lincoln, and to pick out the three who had put 
into action as President the strongest wills, in 
choosing Cleveland, Roosevelt and Wilson. Yet 
you cannot say that the style of any of the three 
is a strong man's style. None is rich in " rugged 
maxims hewn from life." President Roosevelt 
wrote and spoke like a strong man now and 
again, in spots, but in the mass his style is too 
wordy, too prolix, too desperately emphatic to 
be strong. He found expression as much too 
easy as President Cleveland found it impossible. 
Something said of another writer by Mr. Charles 
Whibley is true of President Roosevelt — he 
seldom " used a sentence if a page would do as 
well." President Wilson is a conscious artist, 
in words — which of course President Roosevelt 
and President Cleveland were not — but strength 
is not one of the marks at which his art aims. 
His style is too gracefully conscious of his audi- 
ence for strength, too sunnily persuasive, too 
nicely lubricated, too smooth. 

The ideal manner for strong-willed Presidents 
is still to seek. And for presidential candidates 
who intend to be strong. Were I a Republican, 
a soldier, and a man with a grievance, and if I 



"A Road to Yesterday" 41 

thought of having a presidential nomination 
thrust upon me, I believe I'd try to forget my 
grievance and not to remember too interrupt- 
edly, when it came to fashioning my mere 
style, that I was a soldier. Soldierly curtness is 
admirable in the Duke of Wellington, to whom 
it came natural, but the imitation article runs 
a risk of sounding like General Leonard Wood. 
March, 1919. 



BRYAN 

EVERY man, people say, gets the inter- 
viewer he deserves. It is not true. Few- 
notables have any such luck. In my whole life 
I've read the perfect interview just once. This 
was in January, 1895, not long after the first 
performance of " An Ideal Husband," when the 
London " Sketch " published Gilbert Burgess's 
interview with Oscar Wilde. Mr. Burgess was 
a man who knew the difference between ques- 
tions and questions. He asked the right ones: 

" What are the exact relations between literature 
and the drama? " 

" Exquisitely accidental. That is why I think them 
so necessary." 

" And the exact relation between the actor and the 
dramatist? " 

Mr. Wilde looked at me with a serious expression 
which changed almost immediately into a smile, as he 
replied, " Usually a little strained." 

" But surely you regard the actor as a creative 
artist?" 

" Yes," replied Mr. Wilde with a touch of pathos in 
his voice, " terribly creative — terribly creative ! " 

The interview is republished in the volume 
called " Decorative Art in America " (Bren- 

42 



Bryan 43 

tano's, 1906), and is still as fresh as ever, after 
twenty years. I turned back to it the other day, 
after reading here and there in two small blue 
volumes published in 1909, " Speeches of 
William Jennings Bryan, Revised and Arranged 
by Himself," and wondering whether Mr. Bryan 
would ever fall into the ideal interviewer's 
hands. You, for example, could not interview 
Mr. Bryan properly, nor could I. We should 
feel both supercilious and intimidated. The man 
for the job is somebody who could mediate 
fearlessly between the remote Bryan period and 
the present time. Does such a man exist? By 
accident I have hit upon the right party — 
Hector Malone. Of Hector his creator has 
written, in the stage directions to " Man and 
Superman," that " the engaging freshness of his 
personality and the dumbfoundering staleness 
of his culture make it extremely difficult to de- 
cide whether he is worth knowing; for whilst 
his company is undeniably pleasant and enliven- 
ing, there is intellectually nothing new to be got 
out of him." You already perceive a certain 
affinity between Hector Malone and Mr. Bryan. 
Now for their unlikeness : When Hector "finds 
people chattering harmlessly about Anatole 



44 Books and Things 

France and Nietzsche, he devastates them with 
Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of the Breakfast 
Table, and even Macaulay." 

It is an affair of proportion. As Nietzsche 
and Anatole France are to Macaulay, Matthew 
Arnold and the Autocrat, so, in the scale of 
modernity, are these authors to those with 
whom Mr. Bryan does his devastating. Mr. 
Bryan's culture would seem about as dumb- 
founderingly stale to Hector Malone as Hec- 
tor's does to a generation fed on Anatole and 
Nietzsche. Hector is too modern and sophisti- 
cated to quote Gray's " Elegy," "The Deserted 
Village," Tom Moore and William Cullen 
Bryant. He knows that people don't do such 
things. But Mr. Bryan does them, and adds 
other incredibilities. Like Tennyson's brook, 
Demosthenes has said, Rollin tells us, Muelbach 
relates an incident, as Plutarch would say — here 
they are, and more of the same in these two 
blue volumes. Looking backward, Mr. Bryan 
quotes " breathes there a man with soul so 
dead " and " truth crushed to earth." Looking 
forward, he says that after Alexander and Na- 
poleon " are forgotten, and their achievements 



Bryan 45 

disappear in the cycle's sweep of years, children 
will still lisp the name of Jefferson." 

The earliest of these speeches and lectures is 
dated 1881 and the latest 1909. In reality all of 
them have the same age. They all taste of 
" das Ewig-gestrige, das Flache." In 1904 Mr. 
Bryan gives " the reasons which lead me to be- 
lieve that Christ has fully earned the right to 
be called The Prince of Peace," and meditates 
thus upon eggs : " The egg is the most universal 
of foods and its use dates from the beginning, 
but what is more mysterious than an egg? 
. . . We eat eggs, but we cannot explain an 
egg." From its context in a lecture on " Man," 
delivered at the Nebraska State University in 
1905, and also at Illinois College, I take this: 
" Ask the mother who holds in her arms her 
boy, what her ideal is concerning him and she 
will tell you that she desires that his heart may 
be so pure that it could be laid upon a pillow 
and not leave a stain; that his ambition may be 
so holy that it could be whispered in an angel's 
ear. . . . 

If there is already too much superciliousness 
in the world such passages do harm. They do 



46 Books and Things 

good if there is not superciliousness enough. 
In either case they do good in their context. 
They and their context have helped thousands 
upon thousands of Chautauquan early risers to 
be cheerful and industrious and unselfish and. 
kind. These speeches reveal an incomparable 
mental unpreparedness to deal with their grave 
subjects, with the resurrection of the body, the 
atonement, miracles, inventions, evolution, faith, 
the soul, the secret of life. With an easy, happy 
flow the make-believe thought comes out in 
sincere and shallow sentences, which make one 
respect Mr. Bryan's good intentions, and ad- 
mire his sweetness and good will. Thousands 
of good men and women have grown better on 
this thin food. Blessed are those who mean 
well, for they shall be spared the labor of 
thought. 

It sounds patronizing, my attitude, and it is. 
Although you and I can no more write signifi- 
cantly of life or death than Mr. Bryan can, yet 
we have a superficial sophistication, we have 
acquired a suspicion that twaddle exists and 
may be distinguished from its opposite. There- 
fore do we smile complacently, in our offensive 



Bryan 47 

way, when Mr. Bryan sets forth " the reasons 
which lead me to believe that Christ has fully 
earned the right to be called The Prince of 
Peace." Little as we patronized him in 1896, 
how can we help patronizing Mr. Bryan now 
when we find him patronizing Christ? 

Chronic good will, courage, a capacity for 
sudden formidableness, an early perception of 
important discontents, sympathy with the un- 
privileged average — in this mixture, I suppose, 
we must seek the explanation of his hold upon 
his followers. His size and importance were 
measured at the Baltimore convention in 1912, 
and again in the following spring, when Presi- 
dent Wilson, afraid to leave him outside and 
hostile, turned him into a third-rate secretary 
of state and a useful backer of presidential legis- 
lation. One likes to imagine him sitting in the 
state department, mellowed by his popularity, 
set free from old jealousies, showing an unex- 
pected capacity for team play, frock-coatedly 
glad-handing and kind-wording a hundred callers 
a day, always glib and sunny and sincere. Is he 
a shade more acquisitive than you'd think to find 
such a very popular hero? Perhaps. Is he, for 



48 Books and Things 

a man with exactly his reputation, a little too 
smooth, too unrugged, too deficient in homely 
humor? Why not? In every reputation, how- 
ever explicable, there is a residuum of mystery. 
" What," as Mr. Bryan himself says, " is more 
mysterious than an egg?" 
December, 1914. 



SOMEWHERE IN HEAVEN 

SOMEWHERE in Heaven. January i, 1918 
(delayed in transmission). This afternoon 
your correspondent finally succeeded, by meth- 
ods which if divulged would be widely imitated, 
in obtaining a pass admitting him to the throne 
room. It is a modern and commodious apart- 
ment, with walls on three sides, and a door 
at one end. Opposite the door is the great 
white throne, which would perhaps appear 
monotonous to our terrestrial taste were it not 
for the sapphires which relieve the whiteness. 
The fourth wall is missing, thus affording an 
uninterrupted outlook upon space. By glancing 
downward and to the left, any one seated on 
the throne may obtain a commanding view of 
the created universe. Before the ceremony of 
the day began I had an opportunity, of which 
I did not hesitate to avail myself freely, to sur- 
vey from this infinite height the various worlds 
below, as they went circling their suns and 
spinning, with a more private motion, each upon 
its own little axis. Turning again to the room 

49 



^O Books and Things 

after mastering this prospect, I noticed that ex- 
cept for the throne itself the only furniture was 
a gramophone, standing near the middle of the 
floor in a case of jasper. 

Conversation with my guide was at this 
point rendered impossible by the opening of the 
door, and the entrance of a select yet represen- 
tative delegation of the heavenly host, which for 
the most part dispersed itself about the room. 
One angel, however, took his stand near the 
gramophone and immediately busied himself 
with its mechanism. My guide, in answer to my 
discreet inquiry who this might be, looked sur- 
prised. " The Victor Recording Angel, of 
course," he whispered. "But hush! The cere- 
mony begins." Turning toward the throne, 
which had been vacant a moment before, I saw 
the Lord of Creation seated upon it. I had not 
seen Him come in. Suddenly He was there. 

After a little preliminary and melodious 
praise there was a short silence, which was 
broken by the Lord of Creation. " From all 
these competing spheres," He said, with a large 
gesture toward the universe beneath, " I can, 
by the aid of my all-seeing eye, select instantane- 
ously, if I choose to do so, the successful candi- , 



Somewhere in Heaven jji 

date. For the moment I do not choose, prefer- 
ring rather to subject each world in turn to an 
august scrutiny. By such concessions, made to 
the prejudices which flourish down there, does 
intuitive omniscience condescend to dress itself 
in the garments of that thing which perishable 
minds call reasoned judgment." He paused, 
and, after peering down on Creation a while, 
resumed the golden thread of his discourse: 
" This formality over, for by what other name 
shall we call a series of acts of which the only 
purpose can be to tell the Lord of Creation that 
which He knew already, and has known since 
the beginning of years, I proceed to deliver 
judgment. That one," He continued, pointing 
with an inerrant ringer, " the one upon which 
the fruit of the tree of knowledge is science, and 
upon which for three years and a half the main 
business of science has been destruction and 
death, that is the worst world in the world." 

At this point a lively little fellow, whom I had 
not noticed among those present, stepped for- 
ward into the vacant space near the throne. He 
was dressed in red, wore horns of an old- 
fashioned cut, and seemed eager to put in his 
word. He spoke vehemently with a strong 



$2 Books and Things 

German accent, about man, for whom he made 
the following apology : 

Ein wenig besser wiird' er leben 

Hattst du ihm nicht den Schein des Himmelslichts 

nicht gegeben ; 
Er nennt's Vernunft und brauchst's allein 
Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein. 

Upon the face of the Lord of Creation I 
seemed to detect an expression of extreme 
weariness, such as we see upon human faces 
when a story is related which was old when all 
its hearers were young. But the Lord, however 
bored He may have been, did not lay courtesy 
of manner aside. " It is well said, Mephis- 
topheles," He began, while the little fellow 
glowed with pleasure, and even sent off a few 
sparks of the same. " It is well said. I remem- 
ber thinking so the first time you said it, about 
a hundred years ago." When the laughter had 
subsided the Lord went on, in a sterner tone: 
" This transfer of hell to earth has not taught 
Mephistopheles any new wisdom. He learns 
nothing and forgets nothing — least of all his own 
words." 

" Speaking of words," the Lord resumed, 
after watching Mephistopheles take refuge 



Somewhere in Heaven 53 

where the heavenly host was densest, " speaking 
of words reminds me." And He signaled to 
the Victor Recording Angel, at whose bidding 
the gramophone began its labors. The records 
seemed to have been exposed wherever and 
whenever, in the year 1917, human ineptitude 
and foolishness had spoken, yet this self-indict- 
ment of the human race, however painful to 
your and its representative, seemed not at all 
to touch the Lord of Creation. He listened 
tolerantly at first, as one accustomed to this sort 
of thing, and after a little His attention wan- 
dered. But on a sudden it came back. His 
countenance darkened and He said impera- 
tively: "Repeat the last record." 

These were the words uttered by the gramo- 
phone, whose German accent I thought posi- 
tively indecent: "The year 1917 with its great 
battles has proved that the German people 
has in the Lord of Creation an unconditional 
and avowed ally, on whom it can absolutely 
rely." 

The heavenly host shuddered at the blas- 
phemy and stood at gaze. "Who said this?" 
asked the Lord of Creation in a dangerous 
voice. " The Emperor William, Sire, in a 



54 Books and Things 

speech to his second army on the French front, 
Saturday, December 22, 1917." 

Mephistopheles, perceiving a chance still fur- 
ther to incense the Lord, came forward and 
raised his voice : " William's words, Sire, and it 
was very nice of him to express such an opinion, 
I must say." And he added, in what seems to 
be his favorite language : 

Es ist gar hiibsch von einem grossen Herrn 

So menschlich von dem Gotte selbst zu sprechen. 

On the Lord's cheek the flush of rage o'er- 
came the ashen hue of age. " And this of me? " 
He said. " Before the year 1918 is a year old 
— but I forget myself. Being slow to anger I 
will postpone my wrath until I have explained. 

" Each man upon earth I have condemned to 
be born in another's pain and to die in his own. 
This statement is not literally true, but it is 
rhetorically, I think, effective, besides being part 
of that system which I have followed in the 
natural world, where, in the laws of nature, 
which are my laws, I have put the case against 
my character for mercifulness more powerfully 
than any of my critics has ever put it. I send 
misery and destruction and death upon the just 



Somewhere in Heaven 55 

and the unjust. Men are at liberty to draw 
from this fact whatever inference they please, 
but woe unto those who draw the wrong 
inference. 

" William has drawn the wrong inference. 
He has inferred that I am on his side. For 
years he has shown an increasing inclination to 
add a fourth party to a perfectly good Trinity. 
His words either mean that he is increasingly 
unable to distinguish between himself and me, 
or they mean nothing. This likeness does not 
exist. My worst enemies, even when they 
called me cruel, have seen nothing in my words 
which resemble either William's egotistic bluster 
or his arrogant whine. 

" Let me quote an author who wrote in that 
language which is so often heard on the lips 
of Mephistopheles. It was Schopenhauer who 
said that the best man is he who makes least 
distinction between himself and other men. Pos- 
sibly. But the assertion is by no means so in- 
disputably true as this — that the worst and 
maddest man is he who sees the least difference 
between himself and the Lord of Creation." 

He stopped for a moment, and then added, in 
a voice as clear as a winter sky, at sunset after 



56 Books and Things 

a cloudless day, " William's punishment shall be 
to see himself, "before he dies, as I see him. If 
he can then perceive any likeness between him 
and me, I shall be surprised. And this, as you 
all know, would for me be a new experience." 
January, 1918. 



ZEPPELINITIS 

MUCH reading of interviews with returning 
travellers who had almost seen Zeppelins 
over London, and of wireless messages from 
other travellers who had come even nearer see- 
ing the great sight, had made me, I suppose, 
morbidly desirous of escape from a city where 
other such travellers were presumably at large. 
However that may be, when Mrs. Watkin asked 
me to spend Sunday at her place in the country, 
I broke an old habit and said I'd go. When last 
I had visited her house she worshipped success 
in the arts, and her recipe was to have a few 
successes to talk and a lot of us unsuccessful 
persons to listen. At that time her aesthetic 
was easy to understand. " Every great statue," 
she said, " is set up in a public place. Every 
great picture brings a high price. Every great 
book has a large sale. That is what greatness 
in art means." Her own brand of talk was not 
in conflict with what she would have called her 
then creed. She never said a thing was very 
black. She neyer said it was as black as the ace 

57 



58 Books and Things 

of spades. She always said it was as black as 
the proverbial ace of spades. Once I ventured 
to insinuate that perhaps it would be more nobly- 
new to say " as black as the proverbial ace of 
proverbial spades," but the suggestion left her 
at peace with her custom. Well, when I got to 
her house last week, and had a chance to scruti- 
nize the others, they did not look as if she had 
chosen them after any particular pattern. 

Dinner, however, soon enabled us all to guess 
the model from which Mrs. Watkin had striven 
to copy her occasion. I was greatly relishing 
the conversation of my left-hand neighbor, a 
large-eyed, wondering-eyed woman, who said 
little and seemed never to have heard any of the 
things I usually say when dining out, and who 
I dare swear would have looked gratefully sur- 
prised had I confided to her my discovery that 
in the beginning God created the heaven and 
the earth. Before we were far gone with food 
the attention of this tactful person was torn 
from me by our hostess, whose voice was heard 
above the other voices: " Oh, Mr. Sheer, do tell 
us your experience. I want all our friends to 
hear it." Mr. Sheer, identifiable by the throat- 



Zeppelinitis 59 

clearing look which suffused his bleached, con- 
servative face, was not deaf to her appeal. He 
had just returned from London, where he had 
been at the time of the Zeppelin raid, and al- 
though he had not himself been so fortunate as 
to see a Zeppelin, but had merely been a modest 
witness of the sporting fortitude with which 
London endured that visitation, the Zeppelin- 
in-chief had actually been visible to the brother 
of his daughter's governess. " At the noise of 
guns," said Mr. Sheer, " we all left the res- 
taurant where we were dining, Mrs. Humphry 
Ward, George Moore, Asquith, Miss Pank- 
hurst and I, and walked, not ran, into the street, 
where it was the work of a moment for me to 
climb a lamp-post, whence I obtained a nearer 
view of what was going on overhead. Nothing 
there but blackness." Instinctively I glanced at 
Mrs. Watkin, upon whose lips the passage of 
words like " as the proverbial ace of spades " 
was clearly to be seen. " Of course," Mr. 
Sheer went on, " I couldn't indefinitely hold my 
coign of vantage, which I relinquished in favor 
of Mrs. Humphry Ward, to whom at her laugh- 
ing request George Moore and I gave a leg up. 
She remained there a few moments, one foot on 



60 Books and Things 

my shoulder and one on Sir Edward Carson's 
— she is not a light woman — and then we helped 
her down, Asquith and I. When I got back to 
my lodgings in Half-Moon Street I found that 
the governess's brother, who had been lucky 
enough to see a Zeppelin, had gone home. I 
shall not soon forget my experience." This nar- 
rative was wonderful to my left-hand neighbor. 
It made her feel as if she had really been there 
and seen it all with her own eyes. 

Mr. Mullinger, who was the next speaker on 
Mrs. Watkin's list, and who had returned from 
Europe on the same boat with Mr. Sheer, had 
had a different experience. On the evening of 
the raid he was in a box at the theatre where 
Guitry, who had run over from Paris, was ap- 
pearing in the title role of Phedre, when the 
noise of firing was heard above the alexandrines 
of Racine. "With great presence of mind," so 
Mr. Mullinger told us, " Guitry came down 
stage, right, and said in quizzical tone to us: 
' Eh bien, chere petite folic et vieux marchcur, 
just run up to the roof, will you please, and tell 
us what it's all about, don't you know.' The 
Princess and I stood up and answered in the 



Zeppelinitis 61 

same tone, ' Right-o, mon viea.v' and were 
aboard the lift in no time. From the roof we 
could see nothing, and as it was raining and we 
had no umbrellas, we of course didn't stay. 
When we got back I stepped to the front of 
the box and said : ' The Princess and Mr. Mul- 
linger beg to report that on the roof it is rain- 
ing rain.' The words were nothing, if you like, 
but I spoke them just like that, with a twinkle 
in my eye, and perhaps it was that twinkle 
which reassured the house and started a roar of 
laughter. The performance went on as if noth- 
ing remarkable had happened. Wonderfully 
poised, the English." And this narrative, too, 
was so fortunate as to satisfy my left-hand 
neighbor. It made her feel as if she had been 
there herself, and heard all these wonderful 
things with her own ears. 

After that, until near the end of dinner, it was 
all Zeppelins, and I hope I convey to every one 
within sound of my voice something of my own 
patriotic pride in a country whose natives when 
abroad among foreigners consort so freely and 
easily with the greatest of these. No discordant 
note was heard until the very finish, when young 



62 Books and Things 

Puttins, who as everybody knows has not been 
further from New York than Asbury Park all 
summer, told us that on the night of the raid 
he too had been in London, where his only club 
was the Athenaeum. When the alarm was 
given he was in the Athenaeum pool with Mr. 
Hall Caine, in whose company it has for years 
been his custom to take a good-night swim. 
" Imagine my alarm," young Puttins continued, 
" when I saw emerging from the surface of the 
waters, and not five yards away from the per- 
son of my revered master, a slender object 
which I at once recognized as a miniature peri- 
scope. I shouted to my companion. In vain. 
Too late. A slim fountain spurted fountain-high 
above the pool, a dull report was heard, and the 
next instant Mr. Hall Caine had turned turtle 
and was sinking rapidly by the bow. When 
dressed I hastened to notify the authorities. 
The pool was drained by noon of the next day 
but one. We found nothing except, near the 
bottom of the pool, the commencement of a 
tunnel large enough for the ingress and egress 
of one of those tiny submersibles the credit for 
inventing which neither Mr. Henry Ford nor 
Professor Parker ever tires of giving the other. 



Zeppelinitis 63 

I have since had reason to believe that not one 
swimming-pool in Great Britain is secure 
against visits from these miniature pests. In- 
deed, I may say, without naming any names," 
. . . but at this moment Mrs. Watkin inter- 
rupted young Puttins by taking the ladies away. 
She looked black as the proverbial. 
October, 191 5. 



VERDUN 

DURING the past week many of us have 
waited breathlessly for news from Ver- 
dun. The possibility that this time a German 
army would be thrust deep into the side of 
France has had fear's power to shake us. Al- 
though we wish the Allies to succeed, and 
although we are not blind to the harm their 
cause will suffer if the Germans break the 
French line, yet this larger anxiety has been for 
the moment put aside by an intenser anxiety 
for France herself, so exposed and so resolute. 
We love France as if the country were a per- 
son. You may tell us that to care so much 
where knowledge is so slight is to be senti- 
mental and unrealistic. That may be true. But 
realism is only one need of the spirit. It is not 
the sole need. If some of us are right in think- 
ing we have a liking for realism, and if we do 
not choose to be realistic about France, then it 
is as plain as platitude that the causes of this 
choice lie deep, that we make it because we are 
grateful for pleasures we have really had. Our 

64 



Verdun 65 

acquaintance with France and the French is im- 
perfect and superficial. Our ignorance is great. 
But objects quite as imperfectly understood 
have inspired some of the most genuine affec- 
tions in history. 

No man understands friendship who can ex- 
plain his choice of friends on merely rational 
grounds. It is just as hard to explain one's 
liking for French landscape, which may easily 
seem insipid to eyes blinded by delight in the 
gorgeous improbability of the tropics, and in 
which you miss that sense of something over, 
of acreage to spare, often given by landscape 
in the United States. Yet a few springs ago, 
while we were travelling south from Paris, I 
wondered how anybody could fail to enjoy a 
landscape so accessible to man. We went at a 
gentle pace, according to modern notions, 
through miles of faint greens turning vivider, 
following the river along shaded roads, down 
wide valleys cultivated everywhere, giving one a 
feeling that everything had long been put to 
human uses. Everywhere was the touch of 
orderly, diligent, waste-hating French hands. 
Then came a welcome breath of the north be- 



66 Books and Things 

fore the real south, when we looked at the high- 
lying spring snows on the mountains about 
Grenoble. Through the colored windings of a 
gorge with no one in it we came out upon windy 
Provence, into a country of plain and low hills 
as fine as etching. After all this wind the still- 
ness was very still at Valescure, where we woke 
up one morning with the Mediterranean light 
in our eyes. 

In almost all this landscape, on the way we 
had taken from Paris to the Cote d'Azur, there 
was an economy, a terseness, that made one think 
of an orderly mind. Knowing so little French, 
one saw, in the people along the route, who are 
so different here from there to anybody who 
quite understands, only the traits common to 
nearly all, the faces alert with something which 
is at first almost suspicion, which changes easily 
into a self-respecting courtesy, and which takes 
equality as a pleasant matter of course. Being 
on the move all day, however, and mostly shut 
up through all this French scenery to the sound 
of our own voices, one didn't hear enough 
French, enough of that voluble speech in which 
every sentence is somehow concise. Perhaps 



Verdun 67 

this was why our journey, lying mostly through 
such accessible landscape, left an impression of 
the inaccessibility of France? This illusion did 
not survive a return to Paris, where French 
speech flooded in again as one did the usual 
pleasant things. It is because one understands 
French so ill, and speaks it worse, that the 
French seem inaccessible when one is among 
them, remote in their long tradition and their 
present habit. In the country one is brought 
to think of this tradition by the many signs of 
that long patience which has had its way with 
the soil. Here in Paris it is the older streets, 
the narrow passages below crenellated towers, 
that waken sleeping memories, that give one a 
sense of tradition, of time, of a country which 
has been great for so many years. 

The interest on these visits to France, al- 
though when I am there I am conscious of the 
isolating power of an inaccurate ear and a 
stumbling tongue, is paid when I get home 
again and take up a French book. I hear 
French voices as I read, and some of them are 
so kind as to speak now and then with a French 
accent. My eye remembers too, after its fash- 



68 Books and Things 

ion, and my pleasure in reading is heightened by 
this presence of a visible and audible world. 
The very journey which made me realize the 
inaccessibility of France now makes French 
books more accessible than they had been. 
Somewhere in this universe I sit and read. 
What is this universe? " C'est une sphere 
infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonference 
nulle part." To say with a talker's ease things 
as difficult as thought — what an art of prose! 
To give to calculated order, to hard intellectual 
structure, such an air of naturalness, almost of 
improvisation! To confine a richness of varied 
elements into sentences as simple as poverty! 
With a casual hand to place each of these sen- 
tences where it can look backward and forward ! 
Here are closeness with ease, wit with profun- 
dity, gaiety that diffuses light. How lucid Latin 
lucidity is, and how Latin! By its side our 
English prose looks turbid and slipshod. 

A bookish pleasure, people may say who 
insist upon a distinction between literature and 
life. But even when we are tasting, smelling, 
touching the most real of real worlds, our life 
is only something that goes on inside us. It 



Verdun 69 

does not require that the stimuli we are respond- 
ing to should have animal or vegetable life of 
their own. Life can be better measured by the 
intensity of that process which is going on inside 
the man or woman who is doing the living. 
Often for days on end I am asleep in life and 
only wake up when I begin to read. Some- 
times I am exhausted by the society of persons 
who think they can open their closed minds by 
taking them to walk through a museum of mod- 
ern topics. After such an experience it is a 
relief to read Montaigne, to remember that 
nobody, in any of the three centuries since his 
time, has had a mind more free, to feel a deep 
gratitude to the nation of whose free spirit his 
genius is the most complete expression. 

Free minds are not possible to most of us, but 
a belief in their existence is possible, and it was 
from France that some of us first got this belief. 
From France, too, we first learned, although 
never before so solidly as in the past year and 
a half, that qualities we had been taught in 
youth to look upon as mutually destructive, 
could exist side by side in one nation, that the 
light hand might be strong, and the laboring 



70 Books and Things 

mind take its ease. Of France we may know 
little, yet our affection is real. It springs from 
gratitude for qualities we wish the world to 
keep. Gratitude is at the bottom of the anxiety 
we have felt, for a week past, while listening for 
news from Verdun. 
March, 1916. 



HEADMASTERLY 

OF course it could not have been the faculty 
supper, the headmaster repeated to him- 
self, that was keeping him awake. Half a dozen 
oysters, a Welsh rabbit, a bottle of stout — there 
was nothing on this list to bring insomnia upon 
a man who was in the prime of life, who had 
ridden ten miles and played two games of 
squash that afternoon, and who had been 
notably abstinent at dinner. For tea he had 
had one cup, rather weak, and half a crumpet, 
with butter on it and cinnamon. Yes, and a 
little sugar, the finest muscle stimulant in the 
world. Luncheon? — but that was before his 
afternoon's exercise and could not be counted 
against him. 

In general the headmaster was not given to 
explaining a wakeful night by physical causes. 
Had he been a bachelor he would never even 
have considered what he ate or drank as pos- 
sibly responsible for his sleeplessness. His habit 
was to look higher, to scrutinize the spiritual 

7i 



72 Books and Things 

sources of unrest. But Isabel, one of the most 
loyal women on God's footstool, had a prosaic 
earthly way of trying to relate indisposition of 
every kind to diet. Perhaps her only fault. It 
was because of Isabel that the headmaster re- 
viewed the three meals he had had since 
luncheon, and felt appreciably comforted by 
their obvious blamelessness. 

This time, moreover, he had an obviously 
spiritual cause for lying awake. Although he 
had dined out he had returned to the school 
immediately dinner was over, in order not to 
break his pleasant custom of reading aloud, on 
Saturday evenings, to such boys as voluntarily 
came to his study to listen, one of our greater 
masterpieces of English. Of late he had been 
reading Shakespeare, upon whom he was to 
deliver an address next week before a teachers' 
association. " The Relation of the Historical 
Plays to Adolescence," he thought he should call 
it. Last night, being unable to find the depend- 
able Rolfe, and trusting to his familiarity with 
the danger signals, he had essayed the first part 
of Henry IV in an unexpurgated edition. With 
disastrous results. His retreat had not been al- 
together seemly. Few of his hearers knew that 



Headmasterly 73 



his inadvertence was due not to unfamiliarity 
with the play, but solely to the grave problem 
which obsessed him. 

Young Wicks was the problem. The head- 
master sat up and looked out of his window. 
His bedroom was in the tower of the oldest 
building in school, and gave him a plunging 
view downhill to the river. The high falls, 
dividing the fresh water from the salt, were hid- 
den by a knoll, but he could hear them. His 
eyes followed the broad stream, visible here 
and there in clearings under the moon, as it 
travelled to the sea ten miles away, and the town. 
Yes, the school was too near the town nowa- 
days, unquestionably too near. 

But for the town he should not have been 
constrained to get rid of the boy Wicks. But 
for the town Wicks might never have gone 
wrong, might have enjoyed the full school 
course of Christian and manly influence. Not 
that Wicks was an unmanly boy, exactly. He 
played games well, although showing little in- 
terest in the discipline so essential to team work. 
What he preferred was to roam the country by 
himself, or with one or two companions, climb- 
ing trees, scaling cliffs, shooting rabbits with 



74 Books and Things 

a smuggled twenty-two, trespassing wherever 
trespassers were least welcome. 

Things such as these might have been over- 
looked, had in fact been overlooked, so likable 
was the boy Wicks, all last year. The head- 
master had cautioned him several times, but 
had not been able to decide upon expulsion. 
He had been reluctant to blast the boy's 
future. 

But last week had come the discovery. Wicks, 
who would do none of his lessons except his- 
tory, had paid no attention when called upon to 
construe his Ovid. He had not heard. He was 
absorbed in a private occupation of his own. 
Strange to say, he was writing. The Latin mas- 
ter, who also trained the eleven and was dis- 
gusted at Wicks's frivolous attitude toward foot- 
ball, had bidden Wicks hand up what he was 
writing. The Latin master was amazed. Wicks 
had been writing a drinking song. 

Then the whole story came out. The Latin 
master made a search of Wicks's belongings. 
He found two notebooks crammed with the 
most damning evidence against the boy, whose 
neglect of his studies was explained. Here were 
songs about the country near the school, about 



Headmasterly 7£ 

animals and birds, songs that sounded muffled 
in snow, songs in which spring woke up and 
brooks and rivers pelted towards the sea. No 
great harm here, though the boy might have 
been better employed. But the other things! 
Stories that Wicks must have picked up on the 
docks of the town, when the ships came to port, 
and that were filled with sailors' talk, stories in 
which the characters talked like the mill opera- 
tives — why, the boy must have known short- 
hand, though he said he didn't and was usually 
truthful. He must have spent hours in the very 
lowest company. Worse still, he evidently had 
not been satisfied with what he saw and heard 
on the docks, he must have made friends with 
common sailors and gone with them to the 
vilest places, for there were songs of such gross- 
ness that the headmaster could not imagine they 
would be tolerated except by drunken sailors, 
navvies and unfortunate females. 

Worst of all, these songs — which Wicks said 
he had not heard anywhere, they had just come 
into his head — were jolly in a queer uncon- 
cerned way. Of course the headmaster had not 
laughed when he read them, or came anywhere 
near laughing. The only time he had even 



j6 Books and Things 

smiled was at a speech in verse which Wicks 
had put into the mouth of the Latin master, 
and in which tackling a dummy had been made 
to seem part of the Christian life. 

There was a profusion and variety about 
Wicks's output that were merely astounding. 
How did the boy find time? He neglected his 
lessons shamefully, but even so — ? Upon the 
reading of Wicks's complete works the head- 
master had expended the leisure of four or five 
days. More than his leisure, in fact. And he 
had set aside just this time for the composition 
of " The Historical Plays in Relation to 
Adolescence." 

Wicks had not had much to say for himself. 
" I really have no case, sir," he had replied to 
searching questions. " Hadn't we better just call 
the whole thing off? " In the end, however, he 
had confessed everything — how he let himself 
out of his dormitory by a water pipe and 
shinned up again before daybreak — everything 
except the name of the chauffeur whose em- 
ployer's motor he borrowed for his nocturnal 
visits to the town. Not more than a dozen 
times in all. Yes, he had been two or three 
times to disorderly houses with sailor friends, 



He ad masterly yy 

but he had gone only to hear the talk, he had 
never done anything worse than to drink a 
bottle or so of beer. As for his writings, Wicks 
said he had been so surprised to find the world 
was like that that he had felt he must get things 
down in black and white; and sometimes, when 
he had a glimpse of a sailor's life, or a loose 
woman's, he couldn't help trying to guess what 
the rest of the story was like, and what kind of 
people they were anyway. Hence the stories 
and the dialogued scenes. 

Wicks made no objection when the head- 
master told him he must go. He did, however, 
showing his first signs of hesitation, ask whether 
it might not be possible to give Wicks senior a 
fictitious account of things. " I suppose you 
couldn't say I had failed to keep up with my 
form, sir? Or that I had brought beer to chapel 
or something? " He was a surprising boy. Was 
he afraid to have his father know the truth? 
Not exactly that. He did not mind his father 
knowing he had gone to the town at night. 
" But I'm afraid he might burn my stuff, sir," 
and Wicks pointed to his manuscript. " Couldn't 
you keep it all for me until the storm blows 
over at home? I really think I am making some- 



yS Books and Things 

thing out of it. Half of this is only first or sec- 
ond draft. I wish you could, sir." 

And the headmaster, although Mr. Wicks de- 
served better treatment, having given a lectern 
to the school last term, had agreed to say noth- 
ing about young Wicks's literary efforts. He 
had solaced his conscience by announcing that 
he should keep the manuscripts for the present. 
Whether he should ever return them was 
another question, he added, but young Wicks 
did not look at all disappointed. 

" My boy," the headmaster had said in con- 
clusion, " wherever you go, do not neglect your 
studies. You have a certain literary gift. Do 
not let it ever be said of you by the critics that 
you have small Latin and less Greek." And the 
headmaster had not neglected the inevitable 
question: "Why did you do this? Were you 
not happy in school? " He was thinking, when 
he went to sleep at last, of Wicks's answer: " I 
don't know, sir. There were lots of things I 
liked here, but it all seemed so darned orderly 
and harmless." 

The headmaster was wakened by Isabel's tap- 
ping on his door. She too had had a bad night. 
The Shakespeare incident had troubled her. 



Headmasterly 79 



" And I've been thinking. James, dear, couldn't 
you say something like this to the teachers' 
association — make them realize how different 
the works of Shakespeare would have been if he 
had only gone to a good Church school? " But 
James answered, with an expression of counte- 
nance rather puzzling to Isabel, that he didn't 
see how he could. 
November, 1918. 



DISCLOSURE DAY 

A FEW months before Joseph Usher's 
thirteenth birthday his mother informed 
his father that the time was approaching when 
they must tell Joe. Dick Usher made no objec- 
tion. He had never approved Maria's policy of 
reticence. " Why," he often said to her, for a 
year or two after she had announced her policy, 
"why can't you let Joe hear these things 
naturally, from other boys, the way I did?" 
And Maria, whose character had the merit of 
firmness, did not answer more than two or three 
times. So long as Dick carried out her wishes 
she respected his freedom not to understand her 
reasons. 

There were a good many things poor Dick 
did not understand. Maria had explained to 
him, once or twice, why they went to live in 
the country a few years after Joe's birth, why 
Joe was to have tutors until he went to board- 
ing, school, why he was to be kept from con- 
tamination by other boys until he was twelve 
or thirteen. But Dick never got Maria's idea 

80 



Disclosure Day 8 1 

through his head. She put words he did not 
know into sentences he could seldom listen to 
the whole of. 

Little by little, however, Dick had come to 
the conclusion that Maria's system was not 
doing Joe much harm. Although Joe liked to 
study he had neither the excessive egotism nor 
the excessive shyness nor the excessive cheek 
which sometimes afflict a solitary child. He 
was quite at home in a catboat and on a horse. 
Both with gun and rifle he was a fair shot. He 
could already putt more consistently than his 
father. His instructor in boxing was more than 
satisfied. And Dick, without having betrayed 
all his hope to anybody, was persuaded that Joe 
was a natural volleyer. 

Maria never suspected Dick's critical attitude. 
She had not time for such things. But his ap- 
proval of her decision to tell Joe was too facile 
to satisfy her. It provoked her to something 
she called discussion. She told Dick that the 
interval between Disclosure Day and the open- 
ing of school must be neither too long nor too 
short. It must, in fact, be of exactly the right 
length. To send Joe forth into the herd before 
he had grown accustomed to his burden of 



82 Books and Things 

knowledge would be an injustice to a sensitive 
boy. Nature must be given adequate time in 
which to efface the stigmata of initiation. On 
the other hand, the body of fresh knowledge 
must still be vivid enough in the boy's mind 
for him to distinguish, upon his arrival at the 
school, between accessions to this knowledge 
and mere repetitions. 

" Our experiment," Maria concluded, " will be 
a failure, or perhaps I should rather say its suc- 
cess will be gravely compromised, unless it be 
made in conditions which will constitute it a 
distinctly fruitful approach to that gregarious 
life which Joe is about to enter." 

Now this was the kind of sentence that Dick 
could never attend to. It put him to sleep. But 
its successor woke him. " However," Maria 
was saying, " we can discuss the date on our 
way to California." Dick did not want to go 
to California. Again and again he had given 
Maria all sorts of good reasons for not going. 
He had kept from her nothing but the truth — 
that he wanted to be at home this spring, he 
wanted to ride with Joe through the woods on 
lengthening afternoons, to walk with him be- 
fore the roads got dusty. Summer? Yes, they'd 



Disclosure Day 83 

have the summer together, many summers, but 
this was the last spring. Of course there was 
no good saying things like this to Maria. 

This threatened discussion, as it happened, 
never took place. A letter from Dr. Claxton, 
headmaster of the school for which Joe had been 
put down, said a vacancy had unexpectedly oc- 
curred. He gave his reasons for thinking they 
might wish to send Joseph to St. Peter's at the 
conclusion of the Easter holidays. The date 
was only a fortnight off, yet Maria, notwith- 
standing the fact that the picking and choosing 
of Disclosure Day was thus taken out of her 
hands, at once accepted Dr. Claxton's offer. 
Dick wondered why. He had even a hazy feel- 
ing that Maria wanted to deprive him of his 
unspoken argument against the trip to Cali- 
fornia. 

Having dreaded Disclosure Day, on the few 
occasions when he thought of it at all, Dick was 
not pleased to find that it had arrived. " By 
our methods of introducing the subject," Maria 
assured him, " we can fix its exact importance 
in Joe's mind. You, as his father, must tell him, 
very seriously and very frankly, that he has 
hitherto lived in an ignorance which, most 



84 Books and Things 

formative until now, must now be brought to an 
end. When you are certain that his attention 
has been arrested you may give him the books. 
Here they are. I regret my inability to be with 
you. I shall return from town in time for 
dinner." 

As soon as Maria was safely on her way to 
the station Dick summoned Joe to the library. 
The summons was an undignified whistle. 

" I say, Joe," he began, " here's something I 
don't think you've read and that you might 
have a look at. They're yours if you like 
em. 

Maria never succeeded, not even after the 
fatal fruit of Disclosure Day had ripened, in 
obtaining from Dick any save the cloudiest ac- 
count of this interview. She never discovered 
that Dick and Joe had spent the whole of Dis- 
closure Day together, reading the enlightening 
books aloud and laughing. 

No bad news reached the Ushers until the 
middle of June, when they stopped at St. 
Peter's, a week before school closed, on their 
way home from California. Even then Dr. 
Claxton was most kind. Joseph, he said, was 
a good boy. He was a manly little fellow. He 



Disclosure Day 85 



had a natural batting eye and his throwing to 
bases was unusually accurate for one so young. 
He was a promising candidate for the choir. 
Nevertheless, and Dr. Claxton came now to the 
most painful part of his duty, he must ask them 
to withdraw Joseph from St. Peter's. 

It took Maria and Dr. Claxton some little 
time to understand each other. She was slow 
to realize that Joe's fault was the habit of writ- 
ing jokes on slips of paper and passing them 
about in study hours. Little by little he had 
demoralized his whole form. Almost all the 
boys kept one eye on Joe, waiting and watch- 
ing for him to start a joke on its rounds, ready 
to laugh even before the joke was made known. 
Dr. Claxton had never seen a boy who knew 
by heart so many of the world's oldest sto- 
ries. Study in the first form had ceased to 
be. 

At this point Maria suggested to Dick that 
he had an engagement to play squash with the 
mathematics master. Alone with Dr. Claxton 
she told him about Disclosure Day. Her mar- 
ried life, she said, and she spoke in the strictest 
confidence, had been impaired by her husband's 
inclination to tell stories and repeat jokes. She 



86 Books and Things 

had determined that her son should never be- 
come a similar thorn in the flesh of his com- 
panions. Therefore she had done her utmost 
to keep him from knowing that there was such 
a thing as a pleasantry or an anecdote in the 
world. She had persuaded her husband, not 
without difficulty, to cooperate by abstinence 
from jesting. On Disclosure Day three care- 
fully selected jest books had been put in 
Joseph's hands. After he had read them, just 
before he came to St. Peter's, she had told him 
that the contents of these books were secrets 
known to all, and that he must take all other 
boys' knowledge for granted. She did not 
comprehend how the result could have de- 
parted so widely from her justifiable expecta- 
tions. 

To Maria's extreme surprise it was Dick who 
found a way out of their predicament. Al- 
though Dr. Claxton averred that neither sua- 
sion nor threats had any power over Joe, Dick 
succeeded in inducing the Doctor to give the 
boy one more chance in the autumn. Stranger 
still, beyond saying that he had persuaded one 
of the masters to tutor Joe throughout August, 
Dick would give no account of his plan. After 



Disclosure Day 87 

fifteen years of married life he had made a dec- 
laration of independence. 

Once at home again, however, Dick consented 
to explain. His idea had come to him when he 
saw the effect of St. Peter's upon Joe, whose 
eagerness to study had completely disappeared. 
Dick had gone to every class-room and picked 
out the likeliest master, Mr. Harold Winship. 

" I hate to spoil Joe's August," he said. " But 
I guess it's the only way." He undid several 
parcels and showed Maria more jestbooks than 
she had supposed the world could contain. 
"Joe has got to study these," he went on. 
" And I've outlined a course for him and the 
tutor. Like this." 

Maria read the paper Dick put under her 
eyes: "The jests of Western Europe, with spe- 
cial attention to their relative longevity. Mon- 
day, Wednesday and Friday, 9-1 1. The mor- 
phology of pleasantry, considered in relation to 
the anecdotes of (a) dominant and (b) subject 
races. Tuesday and Thursday, 9-1 1, with a 
third period at the pleasure of the instructor. 
Laboratory and field work, Saturday, 9-12." 

Maria's eyes grew wet as Dick unfolded his 
plans. " Richard," she said, " I have done you 



88 Books and Things 

an injustice. But are you sure Mr. Winship will 
understand? " 

" He won't have to," Diok answered. " Win- 
ship believes in mental discipline. He can kill 
anybody's interest in anything while you wait." 

June, 1918. 



HENRY AND EDNA 
I 

OWING to the recent death of Edna's 
father, the wedding was to be quieter 
than Edna's mother would have liked it. When 
the two women were alone they spoke of the 
wedding as something whose quietness had to 
be borne with and forgiven. Edna's mother 
spoke in the same strain even when Henry W. 
Henry was with them. Although he regretted 
her tone, having liked Edna's father, Henry 
nevertheless listened with an air of slight con- 
tinual deference. He had been brought up to 
show respect for age. 

Sitting alone in his rooms, though never in 
more than one at a time, Henry regretted the 
antenuptial fuss, the acknowledgment of gifts, 
the passionate distracted shopping. He won- 
dered how his wedding could have sounded any 
louder if it hadn't been muffled in bereavement. 
The noise of its approach was discordant. 
These should have been still and listening 

89 



go Books and Things 

weeks, he felt, and dove-colored by thoughts of 
sweet and serious change. He determined to 
do something which would make his feeling 
plain. It was a worthy feeling. Something so 
new that it had never been done, or not done 
for years. He consulted the liberal education 
to which so many young men of ample means 
are somewhat exposed. He seemed to remem- 
ber that wedding songs were formerly com- 
manded by the great. He knew a poet with a 
number in the telephone book, called him up 
and ordered a wedding song. 

When the poet came, by appointment, he 
bore a lute in his hand, and began to sing the 
song he had written. This conduct was so sur- 
prising to Henry that at first he did not under- 
stand the words. Nor was his surprise less 
when he began to hear them. It was a song 
all of echoes, like the old songs in old books, 
telling how the maidens first undressed the 
bride, and then said good-by to her who would 
not wake again a maid, but would rise with a 
new and nobler name. And in the song one 
prayed that the night might abide, and morn- 
ing be long in coming. 

Henry did not care for this song, which 



Henry and Edna Q 1 

seemed to unshadow his domestic life, to pour 
an incurious bright light upon him and Edna. 

Again the poet came, bringing this time a 
song made out of dreams. The strangest shapes 
of grotesque or very awful dreams, dreams 
which even to himself Henry had not told, 
which he hoped he had forgotten, whose re- 
motest relevance to his marriage he had denied 
with outraged self-respect, dreams he had been 
afraid to look at — these the poet seized and re- 
lated to one another and made into a prelude 
to marriage, the fulfilment of dreams. The poet 
remembered what he couldn't possibly have 
known. He remembered dreams that Edna, 
who was well brought up, never, never could 
have had. 

Henry was shocked by this song, which 
dragged sinister and absurd things from their 
corners into the light and studied them with 
curious eyes. 

When the poet came for the third time he 
brought a song which no poet wrote, most 
surely, but some man of figures with a turn for 
scansion and rhyme. This man treated Henry 
and Edna as if they were quite ordinary people, 
obedient to statistical laws that govern the 



92 Books and Things 

herd. He reminded them that the shadow of 
divorce, though it fell across their wedded life, 
was no thicker than the shadow of a tall blade 
of grass, and that the rest of their future was 
sunlit. He explained this by addressing Henry 
and Edna in the cheerfullest stanza of his song: 

Your chance of staying wedded until death 
Dissolve this holy union and ideal, 
Endowed with riches personal and real, 
Is twelve to one, the statistician saith. 

Not even the poet seemed certain of this 
song's acceptance, for he brought with him a 
fourth, which sang minutely of announced en- 
gagements in the papers, of invitations to be 
addressed and stamped and posted, of the trous- 
seau, its items, and of those present. It was a 
bleak picture of the actual life Henry W. Henry 
was nowadays obliged to share as often as he 
went to Edna's. It smelled of details. 

Henry saw there really wasn't any use. The 
poet didn't appear to get the idea. Henry told 
the poet so. But the poet, quite uncowed, re- 
buked Henry, whom he accused of rejecting an 
Elizabethan marriage song, a Freudian dream 
poem, a poem which faithfully estimated Mr. 
and Mrs. Henry's chance of keeping out of the 



Henry and Edna 93 

divorce court, and a poem descriptive of the 
life Henry wasn't ashamed to be living. Neither 
tradition, nor dreams scientifically expounded, 
nor the dangers and banalities of real life, 
would Henry have. What was his idea? 

Henry couldn't exactly put it into words, 
though the poet assured him that words, if the 
idea were to be communicated at all, must be 
the medium employed. The original idea was 
by now obscured. Henry knew, of course, 
though he didn't say, that he loved Edna with a 
simple, manly love, the love of a strong man for 
a nice girl, but different. He wanted to sacri- 
fice himself for her, and protect her, and put 
his arm round her waist, and pay her bills. He 
saw her in white, with a long white veil, stand- 
ing by his side at the altar. He heard her say 
" I do." He saw a house on the southern slope 
of a hill, and a dining-room, and Edna's face 
across the breakfast table. He saw a sitting- 
room in autumn, lamps lighted, a temperate fire 
of logs, with Edna making tea after their brisk 
gallop. He saw days farther off, and children 
learning outdoor games under his tuition. Fear- 
fully he half saw her wondering eyes newly 
awake, in earliest light, before daybreak, But 



94 Books and Things 

i , — _ — __ 1 

at this he shied away. He never forgot what 
he had been taught, that it is unlovely to fore- 
see what it will be lovely to know some day, and 
through golden years to remember. His im- 
agination walked the near future like a sedate 
cat on a table, steering clear of fragile things. 
May, 191 5. 



II 



From the terrace below, where Audrey 
Henry, aged seven, was playing with Cyril 
Packard Henry, aged five, came a noise of pro- 
test, followed by silence. 

Henry W. Henry laid his paper on the break- 
fast table and looked at his watch. "Almost 
six minutes past nine," he said, speaking in a 
perfectly just voice. " This is the third suc- 
cessive morning that Miss Rankin has been late 
in beginning the children's lessons." 

Edna, after giving her husband one of those 
culpably indifferent smiles which proved that 
she had not been paying attention, went on with 
her letters. Henry noticed that she had spilled 
minute portions of soft-boiled egg on its shell. 
He frowned slightly. 

" This must be meant for you," said Edna, 



Henry and Edna 95 

stretching her arm far across the table to give 
him a letter. Although it was an appeal from 
one of his favorite charities, the Friendless 
Foundlings' Friendly Country Home, whose di- 
rectors invited him, in view of this and in view 
of that, to increase his generous annual sub- 
scription, Henry gave the invitation only part 
of his mind. Something he had read in his 
paper troubled him. He looked speculatively at 
Edna. What was the most delicate method of 
introducing such a delicate subject to the purest 
of women? 

" My dear," he said at last, " when you have 
finished the perusal of your mail be so good as 
to read with attention the passage I have 
marked, thus." While speaking he got up, 
walked round the table and spread the paper 
flat beside Edna's plate. Through eight years 
of married life he had tried in this way to com- 
municate to Edna his dislike of reaching and 
stretching. 

Not until Edna had read her last letter, and 
had spilled a little more egg, on her plate this 
time, did she turn to the passage her husband 
had marked. It narrated a distressing incident. 
At a public meeting in New York, attended 



96 Books and Things 

largely by women in humble circumstances, 
resolutions had been adopted in favor of repeal- 
ing all laws which restrained persons who knew 
how to limit the number of their offspring from 
spreading their knowledge. Nor was this the 
gravest aspect of the affair. Not content with 
urging the repeal of these laws, a performance 
which in itself admitted that such laws were 
in existence, one of the women speakers had 
gone to a few among the audience, whispering 
to women of the poorer sort precisely what the 
law forbade them to learn. 

" Well? " asked Henry W. Henry. 

But Edna, without any pretense of transition, 
had turned again to her letters: "By the way, 
Henry, the Wilburs can come to us the first 
week in July. Milly writes that it's the only 
week they are free. So I'm afraid we shall have 
to put off your sister till the end of August. Do 
you mind? " 

Henry could not very well object. He knew 
exactly how large the house was, and why. 
Eight years ago, when making plans which gave 
a room to each of two future children, he had 
perhaps had the surprising number of his rela- 
tives in mind when he directed his architect to 



Henry and Edna 97 

put in only one guest room. Even if he had felt 
disposed to object Henry would not have chosen 
the present moment for so doing. A more seri- 
ous subject engrossed him. 

" My dear," he began again, " I fear that last 
night's events in New York have not made upon 
you the impression I had looked for. I regard 
this woman's conduct as ominous. One mo- 
ment! Permit me to finish, if you don't mind. 
Incidents of this kind are becoming more and 
more frequent. If something is not done in pro- 
test we shall before long find, forsooth, that the 
size of families has become a matter almost de- 
terminable by the will of the parents. Now, I 
am not speaking lightly. What I am about to 
suggest is the result of thought. It is not the 
result of anything but thought. I have given 
this matter a constantly increasing attention for 
months. I think we should take a stand. To 
do so is, as I conceive it, our duty." 

Edna gave Henry W. Henry a look which 
might have disconcerted a man less conscious 
of rectitude. 

"We take a stand?" she said. "Audrey is 
seven, Cyril five. How can we?" 

Henry's face went a little pale. " It had not 



98 Books and Things 

occurred to me, I own, that you would look at 
this question from a personal standpoint, al- 
though I am not unaware that your sex has from 
time to time been accused of preferring the per- 
sonal approach to social problems. Let us leave 
you and me out of it, I beg you. My idea is to 
discontinue my subscription to sundry other 
good works, including the Friendless Found- 
lings' Friendly Country Home, and to send a 
check to the association which is fighting the 
repeal of these wholesome laws. I shall be glad 
of your permission to send that check in the 
names of Mr. and Mrs. Henry W. Henry." 

Edna was near the window, watching a gleam 
of river at the valley bottom. " Audrey seven, 
Cyril five," she repeated, and added, in a gentle 
tone: "Wouldn't that check be the least little 
mite hypocritical?" 

There was irritation in Henry's answer. " My 
dear, the information which you and I, since 
you compel me to think of ourselves, know how 
to make a moral use of, will, if widely dis- 
seminated, encourage not only childless mar- 
riages, which are seldom happy, but also 
irregular and I fear temporary unions. My 
knowledge brings with it no temptation to un- 



Henry and Edna 99 

faithfulness. Are you tempted because of your 
knowledge that sin may be committed with 
impunity? My tongue stumbles at such a ques- 
tion. But we must not think only of ourselves. 
Other persons, less fortunate in their early edu- 
cation than we, will, if these laws are repealed, 
rush headlong into all sorts of illicit relations. 
This world will not punish their sin, which in 
fact will, it is but too probable, be known only 
to God. The relation between man and woman 
is one as to which God has said ' Are you willing 
to pay the price, which is children?' That is 
the test." 

" But not for us, apparently," said Edna. 
Henry did not seem to hear her. " I feel so 
strongly on this point," he went on, " that I 
would rather forever forego the advantage of 
my knowledge than have it get into the wrong 
hands by being spread broadcast." 

Edna put a hand on his shoulder. " Henry," 
she said, " I do not want any more children. 
We have money enough, I know, but have we 
time? Could I see as much of Audrey and 
Cyril as I do now if we had had a child every 
two years? I don't think so." 

Henry, flushed now and breathing hard, did 



ioo Books and Things 

not waver: " There are other ways of living up 
to our principles than by having children." 

Edna's answer was a stare of innocent inquiry. 
When she understood she kissed the top of 
Henry W. Henry's head. " Don't be silly." 
She spoke lightly. " I'm off to the school room." 

" Wait! " Henry's voice was loud and stern. 
" I am intensely in earnest. Rather than not 
take the stand I propose to take I would set an 
example to all mankind by living a life of — 
of " 

" By living as we did before we were mar- 
ried?" Edna had these lapses into crudity. 
Henry had noticed them before. " Besides," she 
continued, " what in the world do you mean by 
an example to mankind? Suppose you do carry 
out your program? How is anybody going 
to know that we aren't still living exactly as we 
have lived since Cyril was born? You wouldn't 
tell people, would you? " 

She was gone, and Henry W. Henry, in the 
silence which fell upon him, remembered with 
annoyance that before marriage Edna had never 
betrayed her tendency to argue. 

Nevertheless, there was a certain awkward 
force in what she had said about example. If 



Henry and Edna 101 

no one except God knew of the Henry W. 
Henrys' self-control how could they be described 
as setting an example to any one else? Might 
it not be better to show the world one family, at 
least, that could afford to let Nature send as 
many little ones as she chose? The words 
" could afford to " grated unpleasantly on 
Henry's inward ear. He had not meant to use 
them. 

Henry reread the appeal from the Friendless 
Foundlings' Friendly Country Home. Then he 
went to his library, taking his letters with him. 
In leaving the library door a little ajar he had 
of course a purpose. One rule of the household 
was that Audrey and Cyril, if the library door 
were not shut, might always interrupt Papa for 
the purpose of asking a sensible question. It 
was in the spirit of this rule that Henry, al- 
though he had in general no liking for texts on 
walls, had caused one framed text to be hung 
above the library fireplace. 

As the familiar words now caught Henry's 
eye they suddenly acquired a new meaning. 
How strange that this meaning should hitherto 
have escaped him ! How could he have failed to 
see in them a divine command? 



102 Books and Things 

"That settles it," said Henry. After all, no 
act can be an example unless it be publicly- 
known. He really had no choice. 

Sitting down at his desk he wrote, in a spirit 
of obedience and self-renunciation, first a letter 
to the Friendless Foundlings' Friendly Country 
Home, saying that unexpected expenses con- 
strained him to withhold the contribution he had 
so much enjoyed making in happier years; and 
secondly, a letter to his architect in New York, 
asking for an estimate of the cost of making a 
small addition to the country house of the 
Henry W, Henrys. 

April, 1916. 

Ill 

That night Henry W. Henry lay sleepless for 
a time that he reckoned by hours. Edna, to be 
sure, had seemed to put her question without 
any will to annoy. She had had the dutiful air 
of a wife who seeks light and turns auto- 
matically to its source. Yet eleven years of mar- 
ried life had taught Henry to suspect that no 
question could be innocent which he could not 
answer. He stayed awake to nurse his irrita- 
tion. As the night grew older the rising wind, 



Henry and Edna 103 

which threatened to tear the curtains off their 
rods, sounded more and more sinister. 

Uneasily, restlessly, turning every few min- 
utes in his bed, angry with Edna because she 
slept without stirring, Henry subjected the 
events of the day to what he called a dispas- 
sionate review. No, it was not true that he had 
chosen for the ceremony an afternoon when 
Edna would be away. Had he not been wait- 
ing, merely and justifiably waiting, for weather 
that promised a rainy night and safety from fly- 
ing sparks? Had not his judgment, upon this as 
upon so many other occasions, proved sound? 
Already the rain was beginning. The ceremony 
had happened to coincide with Edna's absence 
from home. That was all. 

The ceremony itself had been well managed. 
That, at least, Henry W. Henry could truth- 
fully say. With his own hands, assisted by the 
willing hands of Audrey Henry, aged nine, and 
Cyril Packard Henry, aged seven, he had laid 
a small bonfire in a spot previously chosen, at 
a safe distance from the barn, the garage and 
the house. Thither the children had trundled 
in their wheel-barrows those books which Henry 
had taken from their shelves, caused to be piled 



104 Books and Things 

in two piles, one on the library and one on the 
school room floor, had surveyed once more in a 
judicial spirit, and had doomed. Meanwhile 
Miss Rankin had put Raymond Ellerton Henry, 
aged one, into his baby-carriage and wheeled 
him to the place of ceremonial execution. 

To the speech with which the proceedings 
began, and in which he had tried to make the 
children grasp the fundamental reasons for the 
step he and they were about to take, Henry W. 
Henry looked back with self-respect. Here and 
there he had said things a little beyond Audrey 
and Cyril, but he had done so intentionally, 
knowing that what they did not understand they 
would nevertheless remember, that later in life 
they would make the wisdom he had lent them 
their very own. And his speech had had the 
supreme merit of clearness. Even Miss Rankin, 
who, though a good governess, sometimes 
looked inattentive when Henry talked, had been 
impressed. As for Raymond, too immature to 
react except by pointing at the bonfire and 
crowing, one might at least hope that the scene 
would not be quite wasted upon him. Earliest 
memories were often the deepest and most 
formative. 



Henry and Edna 105 

With soberness and gravity, in a style not 
uninfluenced, Henry W. Henry ventured to 
hope, by a perusal of opinions handed down 
from the bench, he had explained why the 
library in the library and the library in the 
school room must be purged by the burning of 
these German books. German literature, he had 
said, might, if one considered the subject in its 
larger aspects, be divided into two parts. There 
was what might be called an idyllic literature, 
which was designed chiefly for youth, and which 
by its pictures of humble folk, of toy-makers, 
wood-cutters, gnomes and peasants, gave a 
false and lying idea of German life and the Ger- 
man mind. In fact, there was only one form 
of hypocrisy to which these writers had not 
resorted, and that was because the notion of 
fair play was so inconceivable to them that they 
had never even thought of pretending that any 
one in Germany ever attempted to teach boys 
to play fair. Was this literature of lies fit to 
live? Should these pictures of a good Germany, 
of a land where simple people were addicted to 
simple peaceful pleasures, be suffered to poison 
young and credulous minds? 

So dramatic was Henry's pause, and so com- 



106 Books and Things 

pelling, that both Audrey and Cyril, although 
nobody had coached them, answered " no " al- 
most simultaneously. 

Proceeding to the other division of German 
literature, taking literature, as he believed he 
had already remarked, in its widest sense, pro- 
ceeding to the propagandist books addressed 
chiefly to those of somewhat riper years, Henry 
asked whether a systematic attempt to make the 
world German in thought, as a preliminary step 
to the accomplishment of the odious design of 
making it German in fact, could be tolerated in 
a republic? The Germans were such poor psy- 
chologists, when it came to dealing with other 
nations, that everything they said produced an 
effect the exact opposite of that which they in- 
tended, yet even the Germans could not be so 
ignorant of other men's minds as to suppose 
that this systematic attempt to corrupt them 
would be long endured. 

After the speech came the rest of the cere- 
mony. Audrey and Cyril committed the as- 
sembled books one by one to the flames. Upon 
the whole they did their part in the right spirit, 
although Audrey once or twice betrayed an un- 
becoming exultation, and although Cyril, when 



Henry and Edna 107 

" Struwelpeter " burst into flames, gave one 
mournful misplaced howl. Henry was quick to 
repress these manifestations. He reminded the 
children that a just sentence gains in dignity 
if executed without passion and without 
tears. 

Not until the last book had been executed did 
Edna arrive. She was in her riding habit, her 
cheeks glowed, she walked swiftly. " I saw 
your smoke from the stable," she said. " O 
children, what a nice bonfire." 

Even the children, so it seemed to Henry in 
retrospect, had heard this as a wrong note. Yet 
he could not help observing signs of relief, as 
if from a tension almost too august, in the eager- 
ness with which they had turned to their mother 
and bewildered her with explanations. 

At first Edna had not understood. For a 
while it had seemed to Henry that she would 
never understand. At last, when what had hap- 
pened had become clear to her, she looked 
quickly at Henry W. Henry and away again. 
The look was the brush of a bird's wing, no 
more, yet Henry felt that Edna was ashamed. 
She stared hard at the skyline, her face changed, 
she began to laugh and stopped short. Then 



108 Books and Things 

i— — ■ 

she had kissed Audrey and Cyril, suddenly, had 
snatched Raymond Ellerton out of his carriage 
and borne him away to the house. 

Henry W. Henry's recollections, while he lay 
awake and resented Edna's sleep and quietness, 
did not stop at this point. He remembered her 
visit to the school room, where he was certain 
she had stood and looked at the empty half- 
shelf. He knew her posture, for he had found 
her standing and staring in the library, where 
nearly two shelves were empty. And he remem- 
bered how she had said nothing, not even when 
they were motoring home alone after dinner, 
about the event of the day. 

It was Henry himself who broke this silence, 
while they were undressing. He told Edna all 
about it. He explained that the reason he had 
given for not riding with her that afternoon was 
his real reason. And Edna, after saying there 
were some things she had rather not talk about, 
had talked easily and pleasantly enough about 
other things. Only after she had got into bed 
did she advert to the subject. 

" Henry," she said, " I have been trying to 
understand. I almost do. Except one thing. 
Why do we Americans have to treat German 



Henry and Edna 109 



books in a way that French or English people 
would think silly? " 

This was the question which kept Henry 
sleepless. Oddly enough, he had not been able 
to think of the right answer. 

But night is a bringer of sleep and of answers 
with sleep. In the earliest dawn Henry woke 
suddenly. His heart was beating fast. The 
waking and the excitement were effects of one 
cause, a Thought. His answer had come to 
him. 

" Edna," he said, and touched her shoulder. 
"Are you asleep, my dear?" Edna moved a 
little, and said, "Well?" 

" I have been thinking over your question, 
my dear, the answer to which, I cannot quite 
see why, did not immediately suggest itself. We 
must bear in mind that nature, which, never 
repeats herself, has given to each nation its own 
characteristics. Ours is an idealism that I hope 
I am entitled to call lofty. Just as our American 
conversation is purer than, I am told, the con- 
versation of the corresponding upper classes in 
England, so our literature is purer than, I am 
told, the literature of France. You will have, 
I presume, no difficulty in following me when 



no Books and Things 

I say that we have here a symbolism of which 
the significance can hardly be overestimated. 
As our ideal of purity in speech is higher than 
the French or the English ideal, so our ideal of 
patriotism is so much more exalted that we 
burn those German books which they still keep, 
I trust unread, upon their shelves." 

A long pause followed this speech. Henry 
W. Henry himself broke the silence. " May I 
hope that you have grasped my explanation 
sufficiently to acknowledge its conclusiveness? 
. . . My dear Edna, you don't mean to tell me 
that you are asleep? " 

But apparently, to judge from the regularity 
of her breathing, this was precisely what Edna 
did mean to tell her husband. The rain was 
over, the winds were laid. In the quiet of the 
early morning, too early for the noise of birds, 
Henry lay and meditated upon the beautiful 
completeness of his answer to Edna. 
June, 1918. 



SAFETY IN NUMBERS 

NOT until close upon John Florian's death 
did his friends get a clue to his deport- 
ment, courteous always, yet as preoccupied as 
that of an inventor on the brink of discovery. 
We all noticed this, of course, as we had noticed 
his aversion from women's society, in which he 
would have been so well fitted to gain pleasure 
by pleasing. He was commonly understood to 
be a married man, although no one knew 
whether it was by death or otherwise that he 
had lost his wife. A portrait in his library, 
painted years ago in a rather niggling manner, 
and with that air of beting a good likeness which 
is so unmistakable when you haven't seen the 
original, represented a woman with abundant 
bright hair, untroubled shallow baby-blue eyes, 
and matchless placidity. It was this air of 
placidity, more than anything else, which fixed 
your attention and stuck in your memory. But 
John Florian, who retained at fifty-five his for- 
midable gift for preventing indiscreet questions, 
never said who the lady was. 

in 



H2 Books and Things 

t. ■ — — — ■ — ■ — — ■ — 

Never, I mean, until that day, the last time 
I saw him alive, when he honored me with his 
confidence. Not until after his funeral did I 
learn, through a series of those cautious moves 
by which everybody tries to find out how much 
everybody else knows, that Mr. Florian had re- 
peated, substantially without variation, in the 
closing weeks of his illness, to pretty much any 
one who dropped in, the following story. 

Having married, at the age of twenty-nine, a 
lady some seven years his junior, Florian with- 
drew to a castle long in the possession of his 
mother's family, and lying in the foothills of the 
range which separates the valley of Aosta from 
the great plain on which Turin sits exposed. 
Here he busied himself for a year or so with 
the management of his maternal estate, with 
genealogical research, and with occasional stiff 
climbs in the neighboring Graians. Nor did this 
methodical and secluded life appear distasteful 
to Violet Florian, who filled her hours with min- 
istrations among the poor of the neighborhood, 
and also with needlework, in which she attained 
a proficiency not surpassed in her husband's 
experience by any amateur. Although their 
marriage was childless, a great grief to them 



Safety in Numbers 113 

both, she bore her part in their joint barrenness 
without complaint. 

Something, however, of monotony must have 
oppressed her serene spirit, as the sequel may- 
show. At the end of the second year of their 
marriage Florian was summoned to the United 
States by the illness of his father, a native of 
that country. He was a little surprised when, 
his stay being cut short by the sudden release 
of his parent, he was on the point of embark- 
ing for Italy, to learn by letter from his wife 
that she had filled the castle with young people, 
three unmarried maidens and four bachelors, 
whose names were Francois, Ugo, Leiboldt and 
Keith-Keith. The names of the women were 
also given, but these are not germane to our 
narrative. 

As a result of this letter Florian sailed with- 
out cabling to his wife. This omission, due in 
the first instance to displeasure, changed color 
during the voyage and presented itself as a 
charming desire to give Violet a charming sur- 
prise. Florian's excitement rose as he neared 
home. So eager was he to arrive that he set 
out from Turin immediately upon reaching that 
city, although the chance was small of attaining 



H4 Books and Things 

the castle before all its denizens were in bed. 
Perceiving the hopelessness of his undertaking, 
and desiring now to retard his arrival until day- 
light, Florian dismissed his conveyance at a 
distance of several miles from the castle, and 
made his way thither on foot. 

Just before dawn he caught sight of home. 
There in the fading moonlight stood his castle, 
not quite half a mile distant, separated from 
him by a wild gorge. At once his eyes sought 
the wing where his wife lay, and fastened them- 
selves upon her very windows. Imagine his 
amazement, nay, his consternation, upon seeing 
one of these open, and the figure of a man climb 
out. In the same window appeared, at almost 
the same moment, the face of a woman with 
abundant bright hair unloosed in the moon- 
light. There was an embrace of farewell, the 
man's figure climbed down the rough stones, 
ran swiftly along the castle wall, opened with 
precaution a door into the furthermost wing, 
and disappeared. 

Even for so good a cragsman as John Florian 
it took time to climb into and out of the gorge. 
More than half an hour must have passed be- 
fore the lightest sleeper among his servants let 



Safety in Numbers li£ 

him into the castle, and answered his cautious 
questions. Francois, Ugo, Leiboldt and Keith- 
Keith were all lodged in the wing into which 
one of them had disappeared. But which one? 
Exploration of the wing revealed nothing. 
Every door yielded to Florian's pressure. In 
each of four rooms he found a bachelor asleep. 
But already, in Florian's mind, a plan was 
forming which he resolved to perfect and exe- 
cute. In his own room, alone, he thought and 
thought. 

John Florian's arrival did not expel his wife's 
guests. They were to have gone in any event 
on the following morning, when the men were 
leaving before daybreak for a brief hunting ex- 
pedition in the Graians. Violet Florian greeted 
her husband with placid joy. She commended 
his unannounced arrival, calling it the sign of 
a charming desire to give her a charming sur- 
prise. 

That night, when the women had gone to 
bed, and the men were gathered at evening's 
end in the great hall, smoking and talking over 
the morrow's expedition, its difficulties and 
other delights, Florian told a story. " In this 
hall," he began, " a few hundred years ago, one 



n6 Books and Things 

of my ancestors did a queer thing. He had dis- 
covered that one of his guests was his wife's 
lover. He did not know which one. So he 
called his guests together, just as you are here 
now, and told them what he knew and did not 
know. ' I give the lover a fortnight,' my 
ancestor said. ' If he be dead at the end of that 
time I shall never reproach my wife, never tell 
her what I know. But if, at the end of the fort- 
night, the lover be alive, I shall kill my wife.' 
My ancestor was a man of violence, and of his 
word." " And the end of the story? " asked one 
of the guests — no matter which one. Florian 
took out his watch. "The end of the story? 
Oh, it's too late for that now. Or too early." 

Having said so much, and broken up the com- 
pany, Florian went to his wife's room and 
found her sleeping. She did not wake until the 
sun was high and the men were long gone. 

A week later an acquaintance brought bad 
news. Frangois, seeking to regain his own 
country by a dangerous pass from Italy into 
Savoy, had been found dead at the foot of a 
precipice. He had not taken a guide. Florian 
trembled when he entered his wife's sitting- 
room. There she was, at a window that looked 



Safety in Numbers 1 17 

down the valley toward the great plain, bent 
over her needlework. She and Franqois ! Had 
it been any of the others, Florian thought, he 
could better have borne the blow. While he 
told her that placid face was almost disturbed, 
and when he had finished she spoke in accents 
of unaffected regret: "I am so sorry. Such a 
nice boy." 

So the suicide was the accident it seemed. 
Not Francois after all. And a kindness for 
Francois entered Florian's heart. The next day 
he learned that Ugo, swimming in the Mediter- 
ranean off Ventimiglia, had been drowned. He 
was swimming alone. Again did Florian fear- 
fully break the news to his wife, and again did 
Violet pause in her needlework to say : " I am so 
sorry. Such a nice boy." 

" Believe me or not as you please," so Mr. 
Florian continued his narrative, " but before the 
fortnight was over Keith-Keith, who had made 
his way back to England, was killed in the 
hunting-field. He too was alone when the acci- 
dent occurred. My wife bore the news of his 
death as she had borne the news of the earlier 
accidents. Leiboldt was therefore the man. 
Would he perhaps hear what accidents had done 



1 1 8 Books and Things 

for him? Would he take advantage of them to 
shirk suicide? You may imagine with what 
anxiety I asked myself these questions, with 
what relief I learned, on the last day of the fort- 
night, that Leiboldt had died from poison in his 
native beer, at his native city of Munich. 

" I was certain, of course, that at the an- 
nouncement of Leiboldt's death my wife would 
break down. But she did not, and it was I who 
swooned when I heard her say, in accents of 
unaffected regret: 'Our guests were not lucky, 
were they? Such nice boys.' Yes, my mind 
was affected by these singular events and her 
singular attitude toward them. For the months 
when I was not myself she tended me with a 
skill equalled only by her devotion. Whether 
in my delirium I made her acquainted with the 
truth I never discovered. The subject is one 
we never referred to. I kept the promise I had 
made her lover or lovers. I had, indeed, no op- 
portunity of' breaking it. For upon my restora- 
tion to health Violet disappeared. In what part 
of the world she now plies her needle I have 
not been able to ascertain. 

" Perhaps I have not pressed my search very 
zealously. My life has been very full without 



Safety in Numbers 119 

her. Daily have I tried to determine the per- 
centage of suicides among those four deaths. 
I refer to the deaths of Frangois, Ugo, Leiboldt 
and Keith-Keith." 
July, 1915. 



A DRY DINNER 

OF all popular ' errors I take this to be the 
greatest and most gratuitous, namely, 
that it is darkest just before dawn. On the con- 
trary, observation and introspection have con- 
vinced me that it is darkest just before dinner. 
I refer to spiritual darkness. How often in old 
days have I surveyed my evening clothes, taste- 
fully disposed by Heber, my man, and how often 
have I loathed the sight! How often have I 
shrunk from getting into that creaking shirt, 
tying that silly white tie, sullying the purity of 
one white waistcoat more! Don't misunder- 
stand me. I yield to none in my liking for con- 
spicuous waste, but what sense is there in waste 
that is not conspicuous? Often and often I have 
revolted against being an expensively clean unit 
lost in an expensively clean crowd. Even when 
I had bought and paid for my seat at a public 
dinner I have often torn up my ticket, bade 
Heber put back my things, and dined at home 
on a chop and a glass of sherry. 

That was in the old days. Since July I, 1919, 
120 



A Dry Dinner r I2I 

my habits have changed. About five of a winter 
day I return to my rooms, where I often ob- 
serve with sorrow that I am dining out, in pub- 
lic, with speeches. I don't have to look at my 
engagement pad. A glance at the corner of the 
library breaks the news. Bishop has laid out 
gin, both vermouths, whisky, soda, has he? 
That means a public dinner, and I spend a happy 
hour or two with these restoratives. By the 
time it's time to dress, my native manly distaste 
for public dinners is obscured, my inhibitive 
powers are low, my evening clothes are a sug- 
gestion I can't resist, and soon I am in a taxi, 
holding my meal ticket in my hand. Heber puts 
it there. He also tells the chauffeur where to 
go. At this hour such details have usually 
escaped me. 

In its early stages a post-July-1919 dinner is 
not so bad. Instead of that numbness here, that 
forced cordiality there, one finds on all sides 
a sincere friendliness. Everybody has been 
spending his late afternoon as I've spent 
mine. Everybody is communicative and witty. 
Everybody's hand is glad. Everybody rejoices 
to be one of those present and almost nobody 
knows why we are present. Are we met to 



122 Books and Things 

honor some genius whose mechanical inventions 
have not lightened the labor of a single human 
being? Some poet whose mother bore him in 
the New England desert a hundred years ago? 
Some captain of industry who would rather not 
die at all than die rich? Nobody can answer. 
The early stages of the dinner pass in friendly 
rivalry. We all try to guess why we are here. 
Yes, and even in its later stages the post-July- 
1919 dinner has a certain superiority. The 
alcoholic mist is lifting instead of settling by 
speech-time. The silence of the hearers is 
natural, not artificial and reluctant, as it was in 
the old days. Speaking for myself and for 
others, I know we are never quieter than when 
we are sobering up. Perhaps the reason I never 
liked public dinners, old style, is that I was never 
in condition to hear accurately what the speak- 
ers were saying. Under the new system I don't 
quite get the earlier performers, which is just 
as well, but by the time the guest of the evening 
is on his legs I'd rather listen than talk. The 
other night, for example, at what I finally dis- 
covered to be a literary dinner, I heard a speech 
which I should have been sorry to miss. Here 
it is: 



A Dry Dinner 1 23 

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Sitting 
here this evening, and listening to the speakers 
who have praised, in words more eloquent than 
any I may hope to find, him whom to do honor 
to whom we have come together to honor, the 
thought has been born in me, I would say borne 
in on me, that were he with us today he would 
be exactly one hundred years young. [Ap- 
plause]. This, if I may say so, is perhaps the 
peculiar charm of all centenaries, that they deal 
fearlessly yet at the same time accurately in 
round numbers, in numbers as round as that 
world across one of the unfooted seas of which 
I have voyaged to meet you tonight. For many 
years now it has been a laudable practice, in 
that country which I have been all the prouder 
to call mine since I have seen face to face this 
country of which it is one of the parents, for 
many years it has been the practice, when we 
celebrate the centenary of one of those immortal 
dead who live again in minds made absent by 
their presence, to invite some American so- 
journer in our midst to bear with us the burden 
and heat of the birthday. [Laughter and ap- 
plause]. Among my earliest adult memories 
was the tears to which an American Ambas- 



124 Books and Things 

sador moved me, one unforgettable evening at 
King's Sutton, by his pathetic eulogy of the 
melodious inspirer of Coleridge, William Lisle 
Bowles. [Cheers]. There is thus a fitting reci- 
procity, there is that another which one good 
turn has been said to deserve, in the events 
which have sent an Englishman among you 
to lay his wreath on the bier of one whom you 
must know, I know, yet better than I, although 
my own youth was nourished on the pages of 
Henry Russell Whittier. [Prolonged applause]. 
Not unadvisedly did I speak just now, when I 
said, in what may have seemed a conventionally 
modest phrase, that England is only one of 
America's parents. To be both parents is a 
privilege rarely reserved for one mortal or for 
one country. England has counted for much in 
the nativity of America, no country more. Yet 
she did not alone work that miracle which is the 
United States. No, my friends, no. Your na- 
tional pedigree must read, when the final 
column is added and the last tide has turned, 
the United States of America, by England, out 
of the virgin wilderness. [Tumult and shout- 
ing]. 

Ladies and gentlemen, one hundred and 



A Dry Dinner 12^ 

twenty years ago these two lands, America and 
England, stood aloof, the scars remaining, like 
cliffs which had been rent asunder. How he 
whose day is today would have marvelled at the 
change! The healing lapse of time, busily knit- 
ting a bridge across that chasm, has united the 
two Anglo-Saxon countries with hooks of steel. 
This fact, for fact it is, would to James Green- 
leaf Longfellow's contemporaries have seemed a 
vision more wonderful than his own Sir Laun- 
fal's; worthy to be immortalized after the good 
old epic fashion in the verse of his own Evange- 
line, than which there are in English no collec- 
tion of hexameters of equal length, save pos- 
sibly that made in the Bothie of Tober-Na- 
Vuolich by the late Arthur Hugh Clough. 
[Loud laughter]. United the two nations stand 
today, united by blood, by a common past, by a 
yet more common future. Maud Muller her- 
self, in her own immortal phrase, would have 
cherished the mere wish for such an union as 
" a wish that she hardly dared to own." 
[Prolonged cheers. Cries of "Maud! Maud! 
Maud!"]. Ladies and gentlemen, not as a 
stranger, but as an Englishman and a brother, 
I ask you to join me in drinking a cup of ginger 



126 Books and Things 

ale to the memory of one who had as much love 
for both our countries as many of us have for 
either, to the memory of John Wadsworth 
Lowell. [Cheer upon cheer]. 

A speech like that is an inspiration. I 
remember using some such phrase to one of 
my neighbors, before our gathering dispersed. 

" Blodgett," said I, " such a speech is more 
than an event. It is an inspiration." Those 
were my very words. 

April, 1919. 



THE BONDAGE OF SHAW 

JUST as Synge makes the ordinary run of 
contemporary plays sound poor in speech, as 
Chekhov makes them look too tidily arranged, 
as Hauptmann shows up their author's failure 
to compose them with anything deeper than 
ingenuity, so Shaw makes them appear unintel- 
ligent, the work of specialists in theatricals, of 
men without ideas. 

At the theatre, watching a farce, one often 
guesses that its point of departure was found 
by answering a question like this: In precisely 
what circumstances would an almost normal 
person refrain from telling something which 
even an idiot, were the circumstances ever so 
little different, would have stopped the play by 
telling at once? 

Mr. Shaw needs none of these doctored situa- 
tions to start his farces with. They get under 
way as simply as his comedies, move at the 
same pace, and pursue the same end. You can- 
not, in fact, divide his plays into comedy and 
farce. All of them, one with a thicker and 

127 



128 Books and Things 

another with a thinner veil over its serious pur- 
pose, seek to destroy illusion. 

Of course all comedies try more or less to do 
this, and the better they succeed the better they 
satisfy the classic idea of comedy. But the 
scope of comedy is so wide that the illusions may 
be anything you please. In Miss Austen, for 
example, they are Emma's illusions as to the 
feeling of one individual towards another. The 
mistakes corrected by Moliere are graver, more 
anti-social, matter more to the community. Yet 
Moliere keeps always a faith in the old wisdom 
of the world. The self-deceptions he exposes 
are tried before judges assumed to be compe- 
tent, before a society whose general good sense 
is taken for granted. Mr. Shaw denies the 
existence of any such common sense. He is 
forever telling contemporary society the bad 
news that illusion is part of its structure. The 
self-deceiver he assaults and exposes is society 
itself. 

No wonder such a radical fighter puzzled us 
all at first. His appearance in our meaningless 
theatre was more surprising than the first ap- 
pearance, about eighteen-eighty-something, of 
grape fruit on our tables, many sizes larger than 



The Bondage of Sha<w< 129 

our familiar breakfast dishes, and how much 
more pungent. Nowadays all grape fruit tastes 
alike. So with Mr. Shaw's plays. They are as 
pungent as ever, they are larger than of old, 
but they are no longer new. His late plays are 
not newer than his earliest. His originality is 
not a plant of slow growth. Seldom has an 
artist-philosopher, coming so early into his for- 
tune of convictions, reached the age of sixty 
with fewer losses of conviction, fewer gains, so 
little change in the nature of his investments. 
He believes what he believed and feels what he 
felt. Hence his uniformity. None of his plays 
differs from another in tone so widely as " The 
Master Builder " differs from " An Enemy of So- 
ciety," or in doctrine so widely as " Une Visite 
de Noces " differs from " La Femme de Claude." 
Shaw's is the work of a witty and pugnacious 
demonstrator, never depressed by the brutality 
and injustice all about him, always impatient of 
the lying done in their defense, enjoying 
mightily his attacks on these lies. 

Dumas fils had an even greater talent than 
Mr. Shaw's for preaching from the stage, but 
his propaganda was immensely less important. 
In " Une Visite de Noces," and everywhere else, 



130 Books and Things 

his attention is fixed upon some variety of love. 
Mr. Shaw looks further afield, knows ever so 
much more, thinks ever so much more, pays at- 
tention to more parts of life. He has examined 
war, property, education, marriage, home life, 
romantic love, as they exist in the British world, 
and he sees that they are bad. His method of 
proceeding against them is not to turn a full 
stream of anger directly upon these institutions 
themselves. His weapon is not anger against 
things and facts. It is impatience with the ro- 
mantic idealism which keeps evil alive by seeing 
things and facts as they are not and by telling 
lies about them. War, for example, is hateful to 
Mr. Shaw, but his way of getting rid of it is by 
exposing and ridiculing the stuff and nonsense 
talked about military glory. So strong is his 
preference for taking this way that sometimes 
one suspects him of detesting conventional no- 
tions of military glory more cordially than he 
detests the realities of war. 

Pestilent archaic institutions are the objects 
of his attack, but its method is such that he 
seems to be giving most of his attention to the 
flattering reflection of these institutions in the 
conventional idealizing mind. He is much less 



The Bondage of Shaw 131 

a realistic describer and exhibitor than a 
preacher of the realistic habit. Learn to see 
things realistically, great things and small, and 
the future will be better than the present. 
Once the tribe of romantic liars has been exter- 
minated there will be no war in the world, no 
profiteering, no parasites living in idleness. 
Home life will be better and there will be less 
of it. 

Shaw the propagandist, the physician to an 
ailing society, is so effectively in earnest that 
everybody who can take his medicine at all 
comes sooner or later to take it seriously. Most 
of us pass through several stages. At first we 
are puzzled and amused by these plays, in 
which the speeches glitter like razors after a 
Cakewalk, and the mots d'auteur are brilliant as 
poppies in the wheat. Then it disconcerts us 
to discover that this paradoxist means bodily 
harm to the existing order. Next we are ex- 
hilarated and stimulated and compelled almost 
to think for ourselves by his doctrine, so lucid 
and emphatic and cocksure. It is at a later 
stage, when we are trying to escape from the 
prison of Mr. Shaw's common sense, that we 
take him most seriously. 



132 Books and Things 

It is all very well, we say at this stage, to talk 
against illusions, but are not some illusions 
necessary? George Meredith has shown us 

Yonder midnight ocean's force. 
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, 
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore ! 

If the warrior horse were realists, if they fore- 
saw the inevitable faintness and thinness of any 
line they could rationally hope to throw, with 
all their ramping, wouldn't they ramp less, and 
the line on the shore be even thinner and 
fainter? Illusions do harm, we admit, yet it is 
by illusion's help that the world does its work. 
Would not the sanest ambitions dwindle, and 
the highest hopes fail, if the extent of their 
future satisfaction could be accurately known? 

That way of escaping Mr. Shaw's influence is 
possible, no doubt, but not for a convert whose 
mind he has ever thoroughly won. For Mr. 
Shaw believes the world can get along without 
any man's best if he be such a weakling that 
he cannot do his best without telling himself 
lies. One of these days the world will be manned 
by a tough-minded realistic crew, whose labor 
will be none the less diligent because they di- 
rect it to strictly attainable ends. And even 



The Bondage of Shaw 133 

after illusion has gone instinct and impulse will 
remain. At present married life is made worse 
than it need be by the romantic idealism of men 
and women who expect to find it better than 
it can be. But a more rational expectation, a 
clear foresight, will not weaken the instinct 
which brings men and women together. Ex- 
pecting less happiness in marriage than they 
now foolishly expect, they will gain a solider 
happiness than they can have now. The artistic 
impulse, again, is so inextinguishable that 
artists will keep pegging away after they have 
scrapped all their illusions. A painter can stick 
to his work though he has no hope of beating 
Velasquez. He paints to make his picture rep- 
resent what he has seen as he has seen it. So 
with " the instinct of workmanship " wherever 
found, and it will be found in abundance. 

But if we yield the point, if we grant the 
truth of all that Mr. Shaw teaches us about illu- 
sions, if we concede that all are harmful, that 
none is necessary, are we condemned never to 
loosen his grip upon us? At least we can try. 
To see mankind as divisible into realists and 
romantic idealists, we may say, is only one way 
of seeing the world. Turn from Mr. Shaw, for 



134 Books and Things 

whom it is the only way of seeing things as 
they are, to whatever life we happen to know. 
No attempt to separate people into realists and 
romantic idealists can long survive contact with 
miscellaneous experience. Most of the men and 
women one sees do not spend most of their 
time in realizing Mr. Shaw's ideals of realism 
or romantic idealism. They are quite as sig- 
nificantly classifiable upon other systems. They 
are not easily classifiable upon any. If we keep 
his classification in mind long enough, until it 
looks as strange as a familiar word repeated 
over and over, it will at last appear arbitrary. 
Imagine a sculptor who should begin each of his 
portrait busts with a determination to have the 
look of it tell us whether the sitter did or did 
not believe that land ought to be taxed to its 
full rental value. An exaggeration? Of course. 
But what of? Of just the impression left on me 
when I try to remember Mr. Shaw's plays as 
a whole. 

A self-conscious passion for seeing things 
realistically, or as they are, is a blood relation 
of its caricature, the passion for seeing things 
as other people don't. And this, again, is no dis- 
tant relative of the passion for denying what 



The Bondage of Shaw 135 

other people see, even when they see truly. 
Take physical courage, for example, which Mr. 
Shaw dislikes and denies because it is, after all, 
the one best bet of the romantic idealists who 
have invented the myth of military glory. This 
dislike appears again in his fondness for putting 
fear, physical fear, upon the stage. Take for 
another example love, the spring in which rivers 
of romantic lies have their source. Except as 
pure life-force, Mr. Shaw has a poor opinion of 
love. He would resent the behavior of Sir 
Samuel Romilly, whose wife's death drove him 
to suicide at the age of sixty-one, because such 
doings are evidence of a kind not, I admit, very 
abundant, but still evidence, that passionate love 
may survive twenty years of marriage. Friend- 
ship, too, with its irrational loyalties and its odor 
of good old times, has been the occasion of the 
Lord knows how much romantic idealism. 
Hence, in all Mr. Shaw's plays, so far as I can 
remember, no representation of friendship on 
the best terms, between equals. Together with 
human relations at their intensest and most dis- 
interested, as in friendship and love, he excludes 
human beings at the full tide of their energy. 
So much lying has been done about great men 



136 Books and Things 

that he is impatient of greatness. Julius Caesar 
is not greater than John Tanner or Andrew 
Undershaft. Vivie Warren seems almost as 
great a man as Napoleon. 

This denial of the exceptional, this dislike and 
distrust of it, what are they in Mr. Shaw, but 
the other side of affirmation that society must 
be turned into a happier place for average men 
and women? He is at his most modern in his 
effort to overthrow all those institutions which 
keep the poor dependent upon the idle or the 
active rich, and in his warfare against the ro- 
mantic lies which sicken and divide all selves 
except the callous and the blind. His concern 
for mankind, for a world exempt from tyranny, 
brutality, unearned leisure, intimidation, for a 
world in which no man's will is the slave of 
another man's, and which is filled with men and 
women who had rather forfeit their respecta- 
bility than their self-respect, who are neither 
afraid without cause nor afraid, when there is 
cause, of being afraid — all this progeny of 
aspirations is the issue of Mr. Shaw's modern 
democratic passion. 

A modern passion he does not feel is the pas- 
sion for observing and representing the greatest 



The Bondage of Shaw 137 



possible amount of human nature, just because 
it is human nature. He is almost a stranger 
to that omnivorous curiosity, so widespread 
nowadays among novelists, historians and psy- 
chologists, which is eager to contradict or 
verify what our fathers have told us about man, 
to make discoveries, to treat nothing as 
negligible if it be human. Such a disinterested 
curiosity would perhaps be an encumbrance to 
an artist as bent on changing our minds as Mr. 
Shaw is. Accordingly we find his gift of sharp 
observation used for the most part upon men 
and women when they are in contact with 
romantic idealism, either as its destroyers or its 
victims, and especially at the moment of their 
conversion to realism. He has some observa- 
tion to spare for them at other moments, but 
unless you remember his purpose, his central 
drive, you cannot help wondering why he has 
not more. 

" Philosophy serves culture," said Pater, " not 
by the fancied gift of abstract or transcendental 
knowledge, but by suggesting questions which 
help one to detect the passion, and strangeness 
and dramatic contrasts of life." This is not the 
kind of philosophy people have in mind when 



138 Books and Things 

they excuse Mr. Shaw's narrowed gaze by call- 
ing him an artist-philosopher. Artist-reformer 
would be nearer the truth, and the distinction 
between him and the mere artist would remain. 
The mere artist, whom you may call either a 
convictionless or a disinterested artist, just as 
you please, is known by his eagerness to look 
again and again at the world with fresh eyes. 
He values life more for its variety and its 
capability of surprising him than for its con- 
formity with his previous reports upon it. The 
artist is known by what he omits, the artist- 
philosopher by what he omits to observe. His 
subconscious tells him either that his philosophy 
would be different if he observed more, or 
else that he would have no end of trouble try- 
ing to squeeze his new material into his old 
system. In this his subconscious does the 
artist-philosopher a good turn. We forgive 
Mr. Shaw the hardness and fastness of his con- 
clusions because we know he has observed 
nothing, literally nothing, that is inconsistent 
with them. We should never forgive him if he 
saw all life, and saw it merely as all raw premise 
for his finished conclusion-product. 

It is by never forgetting Mr. Shaw is an artist- 



The Bondage of Shaw< 139 

philosopher that we escape from his bondage. 
An artist-philosopher is a system-maker, and no 
system can be true. But even when we are 
equipped with this knowledge escape from him 
is not easy. His hold upon us is tenacious. He 
relaxes our will to get away. As a mere artist 
his power is not easy to resist. One of the 
greatest masters of clear statement that have 
ever lived, a humorist of the first rank, one of 
the great wits of the world, he knows how to 
use his wit and humor and clearness to serve 
his own will, the will to make us disbelieve. A 
while ago I spoke of his mots d'auteur, but 
really all his plays are mots d'auteur, spoken 
with a practical object. Will the next century 
read and see his plays? I have not the slightest 
idea. No words of mine, gentle reader, and 
a fortiori no words of yours, can tell how little 
we know about the tastes of our successors. 
But I am willing to bet, if they do read him, 
that they will find singularly little to skip. 

Mr. Shaw's destiny is an odd one. All his 
articulate life he has been telling what he took 
to be subversive and unpleasant truths. His 
reward has been money, a reputation for bril- 
liancy, few converts. Then the war came. He 



140 Books and Things 

did as he had always done, said what he had 
always said, and with the same fresh wit and 
energy. This time, at last, he roused thousands 
and thousands to fury. So his chance has come 
for showing, now that he is about sixty years 
old, the courage he would have shown all along, 
if he had had the chance. 
April, 1917. 



A SCHNITZLER STORY 

BE careful what you desire in youth, said 
Goethe, for in old age you will get it. Be 
still more careful, so one thinks after reading 
Arthur Schnitzler's " Frau Beate und ihr Sohn," 
what you desire to-day unconsciously, for to- 
morrow you may get it, and the price you pay 
for it will be the defeat and ruin of everything 
you consciously desired. Our morality having 
taught us that certain desires are not to be 
acknowledged, even to ourselves, we keep them 
in our unconsciousness, where they lie in am- 
bush. A morality less superstitious, to which 
ends mattered more than means, would have 
bidden us do our utmost to become conscious 
of the ambushed desire, to avow the unavow- 
able, to give the nameless its exactest name. 
Some of the worst moral defeats are victories 
of the unconscious over the conscious. Moral 
victories, no less than mental, may be the 
reward of men and women who have taught 
things hidden in their unconsciousness to serve 
ends their will has consciously chosen. 

141 



142 Books and Things 

Although " Frau Beate und ihr Sohn," which 
I read for the first time the other day, is 
Schnitzler's newest book, it is already a year 
or more old. It is a story about as long as 
" Sterben," one of his earliest masterpieces. 
Sophocles, when he treated the Oedipus and 
Jocasta story, hid from them the fact that they 
were mother and son. Schnitzler keeps nothing 
from Beate and her son Hugo but the fact that 
they are in love. This they do not learn until 
the very end, when it is revealed to them in 
darkness and flame, terribly, though not at the 
same moment, nor by quite the same means. 
Slowly, by slight suggestion after slighter, you 
grow aware of the passion Beate is still uncon- 
scious of. She tragically misinterprets her feel- 
ing and her son's. Accompanying this central 
misinterpretation, playing into it, disengaging 
themselves from it, joining it again, lesser mis- 
interpretations are born and live and are lost. 
When the number of Beate's desirers increases 
about her, she in good faith explains the in- 
crease by some peculiarity in the air of an 
unusual autumn. She does not know the cause 
is a longing she has, which looks out of her 
eyes and makes her gestures subtly obedient to 



A Schnitzler Story 143 

its rhythm. She Imputes her own state of 
mind, not knowing it for hers, and her imputa- 
tions turn into realities. A desire she was 
unconscious of, which she would have done her 
best to extirpate if only she had become con- 
scious of it early enough, which every other 
feeling in her would have fought against if it 
had come earlier into the light of consciousness, 
fulfils her tragedy. 

In 1902, when Schnitzler's " Lebendige 
Stunden " had just been given at the Carl- 
Theater in Vienna, Hermann Bahr wrote: 
" Aber nun kommt das Publikum und verlangt, 
dass wir ihm sagen sollen, was der Dichter denn 
mit diesen Stiicken sagen will. Darauf ist zu 
antworten : Wenn wir es konnten, ware er 
keiner." A year later, when a revival of these 
one-act plays gave Bahr a chance to return to 
the subject, he quoted Hebbel : " Wehe dem 
Dichter, dessen Werk" man im gemeinen Ver- 
tande kopieren kann. Er ist entweder nichts 
der hat wenigstens nichts gemacht." Any- 
thing by Schnitzler that I read for the first time, 
whether novel, shorter story or play, gives me 
the feeling which Hebbel and Bahr have put 



144 Books and Things 

into words. In Schnitzler the language is 
nearly always quite simple. Impossible not to 
understand, except when your German fails 
you, what he is saying at any given moment. 
Equally impossible not to feel, when you have 
shut the book and are marvelling at the easy 
path he has made for you through such intri- 
cate ravines, that you have seen the beginnings 
of many other paths, leading toward darker 
strangenesses. You have been in the deep 
woods, along the borderland between conscious 
and unconscious. From little clearings you 
have looked into darker regions where the light 
is drowned. You have been listening to fainter 
sounds between the louder. 

A book like " Frau Beate," if we let it alone 
in our minds for a while after reading it, 
sharpens our observation of the contrast and 
cooperation, in ourselves and in other people, 
of conscious motives with unconscious. Hap- 
pily for the world most of the unconscious mo- 
tives we catch in the act are inadequate to 
tragedy. They are small things. They lead the 
egotist to talk of himself while believing that 
autobiography is only a by-product of his talk; 



A Schnitzler Story 145 

lead him to judge others by what they have 
done and himself by what he is going to do one 
of these days; lead him to warm himself before 
praise from persons whose facility in praising 
he has often laughed at; lead him to assume 
that friends have him in mind when they are 
really thinking only of God. It is not often, 
however, that Schnitzler gives us anything so 
explicit to take with us from his world to ours. 
Seldom does he allow us to see the comedy in 
mortal things as a complement of their tragedy. 
In many of his books comedy and tragedy are 
perceived at almost the same moment. 

Nobody puts his tragic touches and his comic 
touches nearer together than Schnitzler. No- 
body is abler to keep the one kind from lessen- 
ing the feeling created by the other. For 
examples of this art we must go not to " Frau 
Beate," but to some of his plays, say to 
" Komtesse Mizzi." It begins when Count 
Arpad, an elderly man, is losing by her mar- 
riage his mistress, an actress he has been living 
with for seventeen years. Count Arpad is very 
diverting, yet Schnitzler never lets us see him 
as merely absurd. Mizzi, the Count's daughter, 



146 Books and Things 

is thirty-seven. With her entrance into the 
story we begin to see, past the adroit and amus- 
ing dialogue, a tragic background. Eighteen 
years ago Mizzi and Prince Egon were lovers. 
We see the hunting lodge, " forgotten in a 
forest glade and secret from the eyes of all," 
where their boy was born. Prince Egon's wife 
was alive then, and the secret was well kept. 
But at what a cost! Mizzi was willing to run 
away with Egon, but he would not. And be- 
cause her boy was taken from her, in spite of 
all she was ready to do to keep him, she has 
refused to see him in these seventeen years. He 
thinks his mother is dead. To-day, without 
warning, Egon brings the boy to see Mizzi. 

We should all know what to expect from 
such a situation, provided we did not know 
Schnitzler. Either the present would turn as 
tragic as the past, or else we should have a final 
scene of forgiving and forgetting. What we do 
see is naturally neither. The amusing dialogue 
goes on, more amusing than ever, quicker with 
comedy, and the tragic . background that lies 
beyond it, in the past, takes more and more 
significant possession of our imagination. One 



A Schnitzler Story 147 

who had read an outline of " Komtesse Mizzi," 
and who didn't otherwise know the play, would 
say it ended happily; for Mizzi is so unwilling 
to be separated from her son that she is willing 
even to marry his father. But readers or 
hearers of the play are not so deceived. 
Schnitzler has drawn away too many curtains. 
He leaves us wondering what a happiness can 
be like which is shared by a man and woman 
who know each other too well. 
March, 1915. 



BELOW THE AVERAGE READER 

ALTHOUGH I have often travelled in the 
same train with you, and have sought 
you carefully, I am not even now certain that I 
know you by sight. Not in the exalted chair 
which should be yours, but undistinguished, un- 
remarked, you sit obscured by your compan- 
ions. Publishers and novelists and critics may 
think they have found you at last, and resolve 
to keep you under surveillance, yet every year 
brings its evidence that their eyes were upon 
the wrong woman. For you, madam, are the 
average reader. Upon you depends the fate of 
every novel. To your hands the future of the 
American novel, for better, for worse, has been 
entrusted. If you say, let there be lightness, 
light books will be written. If you yearn for 
a tragic novelist, some obliging American 
mother, hailing from Germany, perhaps, or 
Russia or Scandinavia, will before long give 
him birth. 

148 



Below the Average Reader 149 

You do not, I regret to notice, appear to 
realize the responsibilities of your position. 
You are accused, sometimes contemptuously 
and highbrowedly, sometimes with hottest fury, 
of putting your powers to the poorest uses. 
Much you care. No fury, though hot as molten 
metal, can touch you, and to be highbrow- 
beaten you wholly refuse. At this moment, 
where a chivalrous volunteer is hurrying to your 
defense, you take no interest in my approach. 
It matters nothing to you whether I deny that 
your preference for happy endings is dictatorial, 
or admit this and affirm that your dictation does 
no great harm. 

In life, which has sometimes been contrasted 
with literature, this liking for happy endings is 
one of the most innocent of your many inno- 
cencies. One day this autumn, when you were 
forced to change cars at a small place in the 
country, you stood on the station platform and 
watched your abandoned train pull out. Be- 
hind you there came a hurry of feet. An 
average man, whom you did not know from 
Adam, dashed by you in pursuit of that reced- 
ing train. Would he make it? Would he lose 



I£0 Books and Things 

it? You stood and watched, rather tensely 
rooting for that unknown man. His past might 
have been scarlet. His heart might be black. 
In some city up the line there might be a hun- 
dred guiltless men against whom your train- 
chaser had been concocting an after dinner 
speech, and who would be happier and not un- 
wiser if he lost his train. You, while watching 
him sprint, thought of none of these things. 
You wished that man well. When he had 
swung aboard the last car you turned away, 
relaxed, relieved, nor did you stop to con- 
sider how utterly the desire for a happy end- 
ing, that well-known tyrant, had held you in 
thrall. 

The scene changes. Winter in town. You 
look down from your high-built room upon the 
glaring street, where the lights bewilder and 
blind. Two illuminated surface monsters are 
clanging towards one another, each on its ap- 
pointed track. A woman, any woman, frail if 
you compare her to either of the oncoming 
cars, tries to cross the street ahead of both. 
Will she be caught and dragged and mangled 
under your eyes? No, not she. The poor 



Below the Average Reader 151 

creature has done the impossible, she has gained 
the sidewalk unharmed, and you, the spectator, 
thank whatever gods you believe in. For you 
the incident has had a happy ending. And for 
her, too, although she may finish her evening 
near the radiator, opposite some sedentary, 
taciturn monogamist who is as sleepy as your 
own husband. 

This is the kind of happy ending that you 
desire when you sit down to read. But people 
mistake when they say that because you have 
this desire they can tell what you think about 
life, the world, the soul. They can tell nothing 
of the sort. Yours is a case where a great deal 
of wish may imply very little opinion. You, 
who share Sir George Croft's " honest belief 
that things are making for good on the whole," 
have a weakness for happy endings, and so have 
I, though I'm not quite certain what things are 
making for. You would like happy endings no 
less if your beliefs were as vague as mine, and 
I should like them no more if my optimism were 
as symmetrical as yours. A liking for them is 
found among persons who see life pink, who see 
it black, who see it gray, and also among per- 
sons who don't see it. 



152 Books and Things 

As you have already begun to suspect, if you 
have kindly read as far as this, I don't quarrel 
with your preference for happy endings. If you 
insisted upon unhappy endings you might tempt 
our novelists and publishers to quite as conven- 
tional a routine. And a tragedy which is 
tragedy only in intention, which supplies an 
abundance of death or other calamity while 
omitting all tragic feeling, is less excusable, in 
my eyes, than the staple foolish happy-ender. 
My quarrel is with your desire to have that 
man-who-caught-the-train youngish, resource- 
ful, bold, and in love; with your desire to have 
that woman-who-wasn't-run-over young, in love, 
self-sacrificing and devoted to an ailing mother. 
I suspect you, besides, of not considering love 
curiously enough. Richard Wagner was more 
exacting. He said that only the love of the 
strong for the strong was love, and he made a 
list of the imitations — such as the love of the 
strong for the weak, of the weak for the weak, 
of the weak for the strong. He called for what 
he deemed the real thing, and would accept no 
inferior substitute. Aren't you perhaps a little 
too ready to accept anything that's labelled love 
and anything that's labelled happiness? 



Below the Average Reader 153 

One of these days, when I unfold my morn- 
ing paper and learn from the help-wanted 
column that the position of creator is vacant, I 
shall apply for the job. Not long after organiz- 
ing my staff I shall set about re-creating the 
average reader. To me this shall be as near a 
concern as the ordering of my food. Under my 
altering hand she shall lose a little of her fond- 
ness for meeting standardized feeling in new 
settings. She shall be pleased to meet new 
feeling in settings new or old. She will enjoy 
watching the oldest feelings in the world turn, 
as she sees them through the novelist's observ- 
ing and self-observing eye, to newness. Books 
which not only talk about love, but which con- 
sider and communicate it, shall be dear to her; 
books where — as in Mr. Galsworthy's " The 
Dark Flower " — love itself is the subject, and 
where the lover is, and is meant to be, only a 
glass into which life pours different-colored 
passions. 

But the average reader, when these and other 
alterations had been completed, would still re- 
tain many of her existing traits. Although she 
would demand strangeness in her novels, al- 



i £4 Books and Things 

though she would insist upon having her manly- 
men less like one another than they have been 
in the past, I should not insist upon her fore- 
going her attachment to manly men, womanly 
women, self-abnegators, high ideals and ele- 
mental feelings. I shouldn't even require of her 
a suspicious attitude toward big subjects. By 
letting her keep these preferences I should hope 
to avoid the weakness of re-creating her in my 
own image, a weakness which has cramped more 
than one creator's style. 
December, 1914. 



REVIEWING RUSSIA 

HOW does one set about writing the his- 
tory of a literature? One way is to take 
any language you know and read its literature 
chronologically. Through absorbed eager hours, 
critically detached hours, hours of boredom, you 
accomplish your hellish purpose. But for your 
will to write you often wouldn't read, and yet 
you keep at it, your purpose growing. Excit- 
edly you write of two authors between whom 
you have discovered hidden correspondencies. 
But for this discovery you would have had little 
to say of either. As you proceed you acquire 
momentum. Johnson's " Irene " does not stop 
you, nor " The Curse of Kehama." Before you 
have mastered your material you have learned 
to read, not without interest, anything out of 
which copy can be made. That is one way of 
preparing yourself to write the history of a 
literature. The other way is to have read the 
whole of it before the idea of writing its history 
entered your head. Neither way is ever fol- 
lowed. Literary historians have always read a 

i55 



156 Books and Things 

good deal of their subject, and have never read 
it all, before resolving to write. Of Mr. Maurice 
Baring, whose " Outline of Russian Literature," 
published in the Home University Library by 
Messrs. Henry Holt & Company, I am about to 
read, it is safe to guess that his book will sound 
as if most of his reading had been done to 
amuse himself. Before beginning it, however, 
let me see what deposit a little reading of Rus- 
sian authors has left in my head. 

It was Russia leather, I believe, which taught 
me that such a country as Russia existed. To 
other leather it bore the same relation that 
guava jelly did to jellies of commoner sort. 
Then came stories of Siberia and of the steppes, 
and the story of the man who was pursued by 
a pack of wolves as he drove his sledge, and 
who saved himself by tossing his children, one 
after another, to the wolves. A large Russian 
match-box, picturing men and women in long 
clothes of splendor, arrived one day, and thence- 
forth sat on our library table and glowed. Out 
of such odds and ends Russia made itself inside 
my head — a Russia of far horizons you drove 
toward, endlessly, across yellow plains that were 



Reviewing Russia 157 

not quite flat; of bright lacquer-like peasants, 
bending to their tasks in forests and shadowed 
spots in villages; of winter days as cold as the 
ice-brook, when you reached the forest at night- 
fall, and heard howling all about you, and saw 
the hungry pack as you crossed open spaces of 
hard moonlight. The next morning you would 
be off again on your sledge, the forest left 
behind now, and drive all day toward the Volga, 
and all the next day and the next over creaking 
snow, days when there were no low winds, for 
a wonder, and the clouds, high up, seemed to go 
of themselves. Terrible to me, a little later, 
were the images made by such words as 
anarchist, nihilist, exile, the knout. I never 
quite believed the things they stood for existed 
in the older Russia I seemed always to have 
known. 

Since those early days the Russia inside my 
head has changed several times, but it is always 
the work of chance. The lean wolves are not 
less lean, but they have withdrawn from the 
centre of the picture, and young children are no 
longer their staple food. Russians exist whose 
days are not all passed in sledges or exile, who 



158 Books and Things 

have other occupations than bomb-throwing or 
sternest repression of revolt. For a while I 
saw them as men who dreamed their lives away, 
who hoped and felt and couldn't make decisions 
and regretted. The strayed sportsman lay on 
the earth all night by the open fire, making 
believe he was asleep, listening while the boys 
talked, listening to old superstitions refreshed 
by youngest believers. From time to time he 
heard the feet of the horses the boys were keep- 
ing in that vast meadow. Or he smelled the 
earth at daybreak, smelled the seasons, heard 
at the end of winter the sound of waters released 
on a night of sudden Russian spring — springs 
as sudden and beautiful as the decisions made 
by Russian women in love. Women to whom 
love says, " Who chooses me must give and 
hazard all he hath," and who do not hesitate. 
Men who feel deeply, whose indecision leads 
them to act like tepid souls, and who are not 
tepid, who always remember, in bitterness, 
impotently. 

A little later Russia began to change fast. It 
contained more kinds of men and women than 
I had been able to see in my real world, more 



Reviewing Russia 159 

kinds than any novelist I krew had seen in his. 
They were seen more direi ly. The same un- 
obstructed gaze was turned toward their appear- 
ance, their gestures, their sensations of heat and 
cold, their shyest motives, their illusions, their 
most experienced thought. You felt the confu- 
sion of crowds, of battles, as you feel things 
here and now. Love's birth and growth and 
decline were laid bare with a clearness that was 
not unreal. The greatest novelist in the world, 
you would have said, if only his seekers after 
truth had not found what they sought. He 
made all other novelists, even the other Rus- 
sian, sound arranged. Next came, strangest of 
all, the master of hallucination, in comparison 
with whose intensity your own life seems un- 
realized, unlived. His fevered, tortured, life- 
twisted creatures, upon whom their creator 
spends his incomparable treasure of pity and 
love, obsess you as you were never obsessed 
by yourself. When you emerge again into your 
own world you are aware, for a while, that its 
sounds come muffled, that you touch it with 
numb fingers. 
March, 1915. 



ANNA REVISITED 

A FEW pages of " Anna Karenina," when I 
read it for the first time thirty years ago, 
were quite enough to convince me that it was 
the greatest novel in the world. Many of the 
other greatest novels in the world were still to 
read. I admitted the fact. But this conscious 
ignorance could not shake my faith. I had been 
travelling, and was making a stay in a part of 
the United States which I had never seen, 
which I innocently called " the west," and which 
offered to curiosity, on the shore of Lake 
Ontario, people, occupations, manners, habits, 
landscape that were all unfamiliar. This curi- 
osity had been strong, but it could not compete 
with the feeling awakened by " Anna Karenina," 
which effaced the pale real world, brought one 
into unbelievably close contact with so much 
life, gave one a hundred new thirsts and free- 
doms. What novel short of the greatest could 
cause effects like these? 

Imagine your first meeting with a woman 
160 



Anna Revisited 161 

whose loveliness and grace and radiance out- 
shone the brightest that your experience had 
given you hope of seeing, a woman who drank 
joy from deep-hidden springs. Imagine, if you 
can, your emotion when she turned into a can- 
nibal. Imagine the later events of her history 
combining to prove that cannibalism wrecked, 
broke, destroyed her, while all the time her 
charm could not die, but lived on so clear and 
unspoiled that your opinion of cannibalism 
underwent great change, and a new tolerance 
flooded your soul. For " cannibalism " read 
" adultery." I had been brought up to regard 
adultery as I now regard the most German of 
atrocities, plus the warning that it was a thing 
never to be named, except at morning service. 
Not for a moment was Anna the kind of woman 
whom I had been taught to think the only kind 
who ever committed adultery. For this access 
of tolerance my education, it is only fair to say, 
had been an unintentional preparation. With- 
out at all meaning to, my elders had turned my 
curiosity about sex away from all relations 
sanctioned by the church and had concentrated 
it, timid and fascinated, upon illicitness. All 
things considered, my misreading of the story 



162 Books and Things 

of Anna and Vronsky, my misplacing of the 
emphasis, was natural enough. 

Thirty years ago, being in love with Anna, I 
was as a matter of course persuaded of 
Vronsky's unworthiness. This conviction lived 
at peace with the conviction that I had rather 
resemble Vronsky than Levin, and that Vron- 
sky's imperturbability, his haughtiness when in- 
terrupted at breakfast by brother-officers whom 
he did not like, his indifference to criticism, 
were as inimitable as his good looks. His char- 
acter and appearance were food for despair, and 
one turned to Levin for comfort, not in vain. 
Here was a man shy and awkward in company, 
confused when he made the same remark twice, 
a maker and breaker of resolutions, yet nowise 
despicable, a man liked and even loved. 

The common problem, yours, mine, every one's, 
Is — not to fancy what were fair in life 
Provided it could be — but, finding first 
What may be, then find how to make it fair 
Up to our means : a very different thing ! 

I had read this: I had tried to believe it. 
Levin's character and destiny was a concrete 
proof that the problem was not insoluble, that 
one's means might be good enough. 



Anna Revisited 163 

Yet nobody's egotism, even at nineteen, could 
be so blind as not to see that " Anna Karenina " 
was other things than a consoler and liberator 
and disheartener of one's self. It was the whole 
of life, it was a house of death and birth, it was 
a place where the every-day miracles revealed 
their graver meanings. Watching by the death- 
bed of Levin's brother one saw, listening to 
Kitty's cry in childbirth one heard, with a dis- 
tinctness rare in one's own sensations, the near- 
ness of man to the other animals. All the sud- 
den poetry of spring, changing Levin's heart 
with the change of season, taught one to know, 
as one knows cold or heat or pain, man's near- 
ness to earth. Even at nineteen, however, I was 
troubled because Levin, the seeker, came so near 
finding the meaning of life. I remember sus- 
pecting that one part of life was to go on won- 
dering forever what life might mean. 

Unless one is more than common stupid, 
which few of us think ourselves, thirty years 
make large changes in most great books. In 
advance of experience one craves substitutes for 
it. Later one cannot help looking for likenesses 
and contrasts between the book and experience. 
But " Anna Karenina " is not this kind of great 



164 Books and Things 

book. To a young reader it is one of these sub- 
stitutes for experience which immediately be- 
come part of experience, so that one of the 
things you compare it with and test it by, after 
no matter how many years, is itself. And it has 
no secrets. All the abundant life in it is seen 
with the last distinctness, represented with con- 
cise explicitness. The steeplechase which Vron- 
sky loses, and which breaks Frou Frou's back, 
is not more distinctly seen than those obscurer 
places, in Anna's soul or Levin's, upon which 
Tolstoi turns his amazing daylight. Last week, 
when I had re-read " Anna Karenina," this was 
the new impression I most noticed, that I was 
over-acquainted with the principal characters, 
that they were all too distinctly exhibited, that 
there were no planes in these landscapes of the 
soul and no lost lines, that nobody's unconscious 
had any privacy. 

This was not, of course, the only impression 
I felt as new. For the first time I noticed how 
carefully Tolstoi builds up his case against 
adultery, how artfully he represents it as capable 
of doing thoroughly frivolous men and women 
no harm, how cautiously he keeps his Christian 
distrust of the flesh from appearing on any page 



Anna Revisited 165 

that tells of Anna and Vronsky, how different 
Anna's fate might have been if Vronsky had had 
a passion for excavating buried cities, or for 
anticipating Mr. Edison. The first time I read 
the book I accepted submissively the words 
Tolstoi put at the head of its first chapter — 
" vengeance is mine, I will repay." To-day his 
" moral " seems better expressed in this passage 
from Santayana: "Love itself dreams of more 
than mere possession ; to conceive happiness, it 
must conceive a life to be shared in a varied 
world, full of events and activities, which shall 
be new and ideal bonds between the lovers. But 
unlawful love cannot pass out into this public 
fulfilment. It is condemned to be mere posses- 
sion — possession in the dark, without an en- 
vironment, without a future. It is love among 
the ruins . . . love among the ruins of them- 
selves and of all else they might have had to 
give to one another." 

Is " Anna Karenina " the greatest novel in the 
world? No, the world has not seen and prob- 
ably never will see its greatest novel. But the 
phrase is not always vile. It often serves to 
express a feeling for which no other words will 
do so well, a feeling that is even stronger in 



166 Books and Things 

me, I think, while I read " War and Peace " or 
" Crime and Punishment." Does " Anna Ka- 
renina " contain the whole of life? Of course 
not, yet this phrase too serves to express, with 
just exaggeration, a reader's wonder at the many 
living men and women whom Tolstoi created, 
only a few in his own image. But a re-reader, 
though he may not feel that much life has been 
left out of " Anna Karenina," cannot help feeling, 
at the present moment, that Tolstoi left out a 
good deal of Russia. 
July, 1918. 



TENNYSON 

A FEW weeks ago, while reading Mr. 
Mackail's introduction to " The Per- 
vigilium Veneris," which he translated for the 
Loeb Classical Library, I came upon these lines, 
describing what happens to a poet when his 
poem begins to form itself: 

The fairy fancies range, 

And, lightly stirred, 
Ring little bells of change 

From word to word. 

The quotation did not seem quite unfamiliar, 
yet I could not remember its source. Ten- 
nyson? It didn't sound like Tennyson, either to 
me or to the four or five persons I consulted. 
Each of us had what he thought a good reason 
for being almost certain the lines were not 
Tennyson. I hunted without success through 
a one-volume Tennyson containing all of him 
except his very latest work. When I got 
back to New York, where books are, I re- 
membered why I thought the lines were 
Tennyson's, looked in Mr. Mackail's Latin Lit- 

i6z 



1 68 Books and Things 

erature, found they were from a Tennyson 
spring poem. The rest of the way was not dif- 
ficult. Short lines, spring — these signs led be- 
fore long to " Early Spring," in the volume 
called " Tiresias and Other Poems." The poem 
has eight stanzas, of which these are the sixth 
and seventh: 

Past, Future glimpse and fade 

Thro' some slight spell, 
A gleam from yonder vale, 

Some far blue fell, 
And sympathies, now frail, 

In sound and smell ! 

Till at thy chuckled note, 

Thou twinkling bird, 
The fairy fancies range, 

And, lightly stirred, 
Ring little bells of change 

From word to word. 

Why did three or four persons, who had read 
a good deal of Tennyson when they were young, 
and all of whom were forty or more, feel cer- 
tain that the lines quoted by Mr. Mackail didn't 
sound like Tennyson? Because for most of 
them, as for many other persons of their genera- 
tion, Tennyson had faded to a voluntarily and 
smoothly noble poet whose moral world they 
detested. While hunting for " the fairy fancies " 
I naturally read a little here and a little there, 



Tennyson 169 

and so refreshed my antipathy to Tennyson as 
a critic of life. No doubt many persons, at a 
first reading of the " Idylls of the King," 
thought Arthur's reply to Guinevere, at their 
final meeting, was the real thing: 

" And all is past, the sin is sinn'd, and I 
Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
Forgives." 

To-day one merely feels that a man who 
talked like that deserved all he got, and a bit 
more. And to-day, on re-reading " Enoch 
Arden," one cannot help recalling Walter 
Bagehot's summary of the story: " A sailor who 
sells fish breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up 
selling fish, goes to sea, is wrecked on a desert 
island, stays there some years, on his return 
finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a 
landlady on the subject, and dies." I suppose 
ten intelligent persons re-read Tennyson's de- 
scription of Enoch's island, with its many- 
colored tropical splendors, for one who re-reads 
the whole poem for its story. Only a malicious 
person cares to read the closing lines: 

So past the strong heroic soul away. 
And when they buried him the little port 
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral. 



170 Books and Things 

Some of Tennyson's most wonderful pictures, 
especially sea-pictures, are framed in his blank 
verse. But he is no such master of blank verse 
as Shelley. And although Tennyson's blank 
verse is his own, it is also Calverley's in the 
parody : 

Thus on he prattled like a babbling brook. 
Then I, " The sun hath slipt behind the hill, 
And my Aunt Vivian dines at half past six." 
So in all love we parted ; I to the Hall, 
They to the village. It was nois'd next noon 
That chickens had been miss'd at Syllabub Farm. 

Still, I don't see why more of my contempo- 
raries cannot read Tennyson with pleasure, in 
spite of his unsalted pictures of moral perfec- 
tion, his grave domestic answers to unanswer- 
able moral questions, the complacency of his 
willingness to " forfeit the beast with which we 
are crossed," the many lines that might have 
been written by a gifted and meditative curate. 
While reading you must accept or forget the 
fact that Tennyson's moral world is a very 
orderly garden, that the poet himself is a thor- 
oughly domesticated animal. You must read 
Tennyson for the beauty of the parts, overlook- 
ing the moral poverty of the whole, thankful 
that the parts are so often whole poems. And 



Tennyson 171 

it is worth while to remember that Tennyson 
is filled with things that don't sound like the 
unreal Tennyson your memory has erected in 
his dishonor. True, he did model a King Arthur 
out of blancmange, but he also called the body 
" this little city of sewers." And it is fair to 
ask, when Tennyson's Arthur seems more than 
you can bear, what Tennyson's Ulysses would 
have thought of Arthur. 

Even if Tennyson was a tame animal in the 
moral world, he was also a dead shot at wild 
nature. He looked at wild or cultivated nature, 
saw it exactly, sketched it in words, turned his 
sketches into quintessential pictures: 

One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. 

You seem'd to hear them climb and call 
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, 

Beneath the windy wall. 

And one, a full-fed river winding slow 

By herds upon an endless plain, 
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, 

With shadow-streaks of rain. 

Among English poets Milton is the only 
greater master of consonants, of the 1, m, n, r 
out of which English verse can be built so as to 
sound a little of imperial Rome. At the moment 
when Tennyson's eye saw nature his ear heard 



172 Books and Things 

verse, and later, when he had retouched the 
verse into that curious felicity he loved so well, 
when he had distilled and elaborated it into a 
rich and learned magic, the picture his eye had 
seen was still there, unspoiled by this elaborate 
selective process, exacter than ever. As a 
nature poet he spoke the language science would 
use if she had a Latin ear and could sing. 
August, 1915. 



BROWNING 

EVERY now and then, and always with 
surprise, I hear one of my contemporaries 
remark that he or she cannot read Robert 
Browning nowadays. The emphasis is usually 
on the last word. Twenty or twenty-five years 
ago the speaker could and did read Browning 
with joy. My renewed surprise is always at the 
fact of change. Excepting Tennyson, there is 
no Victorian poet about whom my opinion has 
changed less. Possibly I now resent more 
wearily Tennyson's somehow-trustfulness that 
good will be the final goal of ill, and find the 
exceptional blamelessness of his blameless- 
stainless king a little harder to bear. Perhaps 
I groan louder when he says " we needs must 
love the highest when we see it." Certainly I 
get more pleasure than I did from his nature 
poetry, and especially from the art with which 
his longer landscapes are composed. Certainly 
there is an increase in my admiration of his 
" lonely word." If " Hallowed be Thy name — 
Hallelujah ! " seems even worse than it used to 

1/3 



174 Books and Things 

seem, yet this water-picture seems even more 
exactly lovely : 

So dark a forethought roll'd about his brain, 
As on a dull day in an Ocean cave 
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
In silence. 

Forasmuch as Tennyson had Tennyson's eye for 
the visible world, and Tennyson's ear, we for- 
give his docile piety, forgive him for degrading 
life to the level of duty, for wishing to spirit- 
ualize our animal nature, for his invincible 
nobility. But here there is little change. Hasn't 
this been the orthodox attitude toward Ten- 
nyson for thirty years? 

As for Browning's detractors, in the two or 
three cases I've investigated, the explanations 
were a good deal alike. Browning was remem- 
bered as a believer in personal immortality, a 
wholesome oppressive optimist, a welcomer of 
each rebuff that turns earth's smoothness rough. 
Worse yet, said my informants, he is an ingeni- 
ous optimist who seeks to justify his point of 
view by endless frightful ratiocination. When we 
were twenty we liked optimism. We don't like it 
now. My answer, so far as I had any, did not 



Browning 175 

prosper. I began by admitting that perhaps 
Browning, who sees this world as made up of 
so many things, sees it most of all as a gym- 
nasium, from which you pass, after gallant 
arduous exercise of all your muscles, into a sort 
of everlasting track and field day, where you will 
break all your worldly records, swim farther 
under water than you ever swam here, run 
faster, jump higher, chin yourself more times. 
Nor can any one deny that Browning is opti- 
mistic. What may be doubted is that " op- 
timist " is always and necessarily a term of 
reproach. An optimist is a nuisance, of course, 
who folds his hands and meekly concludes, no 
matter what happens, that God knows what is 
best for us. So is the optimist who loses his 
train, unregretfully watches its rear coach 
dwindle, and turns homeward saying, " All's 
right with the world. After all, more people 
caught that train than lost it." 

But Browning is no docile folder of hands. If 
he lost his train he would probably swear. If 
he were standing within earshot when you lost 
yours, and if you swore at all competently, he 
would listen to your words. His optimism, 



176 Books and Things 

whether you like it or not, is his. It accumu- 
lates in him by a function prodigiously natural. 
Quite as natural are his ingenious repeated 
attempts to justify it. He is driven by no sense 
of duty, but only by a robust enjoyment of the 
game, when he defends his faith, which was 
only a normal self-expression, by arguments as 
erudite and hair-splitting as a scholastic's. Dar- 
ing to be yourself is a form of courage much in 
vogue. To give elaborate endless reasons for 
daring to be yourself may be, and with Brown- 
ing it is, merely one way more of being your- 
self. His hope of a better world wasn't rooted 
in an under-estimate of this, for which his ap- 
petite was catholic and enormous. Although he 
believes that God's ends justify God's means, 
this belief was not essential to his enjoyment of 
the world. For him, if the ends hadn't justified 
the means, the means would have justified them- 
selves. If he hadn't found life good he would 
still have found it just as interesting. And he 
was a passionate and rather fair-minded student 
of evidence against his favorite beliefs. I admire 
the accident which united a keen appetite for 
life with a mind eager to justify to itself things 
which this appetite had o.k.'d, and yet patient 



Browning \JJ 

to hear the other side. Browning, with an 
appetite for life so eager that he would be 
excusable if he had taken the goodness of the 
world for granted, does not offer us marked- 
down faith, bargains in courage, optimism at 
half-price. 

To me the most irritating of all optimisms is 
the one which has its roots in reason alone. An 
anaemic sedentary man, who never puffs and 
sweats, who can't tell a double play from a 
thirty-foot putt or cut-plug from shag, loses 
through inability to value the parts of life all 
authority when he tries to value the whole. But 
Browning's athletic argumentative intellect was 
merely seeking a basis in reason for certain 
affirmations made by his senses and his imagina- 
tion and his love of scholarship. In many of his 
poems, he does, I admit, state the case for God. 
This habit gives offense in many quarters. The 
offended persons forget that Browning was 
almost equally ready to state the case for any- 
body else, for a grammarian, a faultless painter, 
a Latin-loving sixteenth-century bishop, a cheat- 
ing medium, the Third Napoleon. It is no more 
than decent to remember, when next you are 



178 Books and Things 

tempted to blame him for thinking all's right 
with the world, that he had first-hand evidence 
for thinking many of the world's details equally 
all right. By his incessant curious interest in 
life he acquired a momentum which carried him 
past his signals plump into a belief in immor- 
tality. 

However, all this is no answer to people who 
genuinely don't like to find in poetry beliefs 
which are not theirs. No answer can be given 
except by persuading them to re-read the 
Browning they used to like. Only by doing this 
can they realize that although he welcomed each 
rebuff he welcomed a lot of other things — a 
sunset-touch, a chorus ending from Euripides. 
His faith was no preference for the high road. 
It didn't keep him from alertly exploring the 
byways of doubt, and liking the wild flowers 
that grow in such places. Although this great 
poet was a tremendous believer he was also a 
tremendous enjoyer, a man who wore a top hat 
in London, dined out, talked profusely and a 
little too well, loved English country, Italian 
country, Italian towns, pictures, Greek, music,- 
liberty, history, the queerest kinks in the queer- 



Browning 179 

est minds. And I can't remember against him 
a case where his faith got between him and the 
particular things he was looking at, or where 
his love of loyalty kept him from noting the con- 
crete oddity of the particular manifestation of 
loyalty that happened to be engaging his atten- 
tion. After all, some of us have no strong objec- 
tion to faiths we don't share. " Sterling and I," 
says Carlyle, " walked westward in company, 
choosing whatever lanes or quietest streets 
there were, as far as Knightsbridge where our 
roads parted; talking on moralities, theological 
philosophies; arguing copiously, but except in 
opinion not disagreeing." 
May, 1915. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

A SOBER green volume, lately published by 
the Oxford University Press, and called 
" Essays by Matthew Arnold," reminds me of 
an evening I spent, almost thirty years ago, in 
the smoking-room of a German hotel, where I 
had no business. If anybody had asked me why 
I'd left my pension in another part of Dresden, 
and was hanging about that smoking-room, too 
young to give myself a status there by ordering 
a drink, I should not have told the truth. Mr. 
Matthew Arnold, who was inspecting the 
schools of Saxony, was staying in that hotel, and 
I hoped he might come to the smoking-room 
after dinner. At that moment there was noth- 
ing I wanted quite so much as to see him and 
to hear him talk. At last he entered. At last 
he talked. It would have been hard for me to 
say whether his appearance or his talk was the 
deeper disappointment. He sat down near a 
French actress, but what he said to her did not 
sound at all like " Faster, faster, O Circe, God- 
dess! " He said, " Avez-vous bien dormi? " Of 

180 



Matthew Arnold 181 

Hungary, where he had lately been a circuitous 
wanderer, he merely remarked that in one town, 
where his host had an English wife, he had been 
very comfortable. Although he spoke of Virgil, 
he didn't even allude to the sense of tears in 
mortal things. He recited three or four lines of 
the Aeneid, just to illustrate by imitation the 
charmlessness with which English schoolboys 
pronounced Latin. 

Young enough to feel disappointed, I was not 
young enough to stay so. After a few bitter 
days I began to admit that the best that is known 
and thought in the world cannot always be 
propagated after dinner, that sad lucidity of soul 
may be inappropriate to a hotel smoking-room. 
Being determined to recover from the Hebraism 
with which seventeen New England years had 
afflicted me, to let my stock notions dissolve, to 
acquire Hellenism, I was soon afloat again upon 
the stream of Matthew Arnold's thinking. It 
would have been difficult for me at that time to 
measure my gratitude to him. I was eager to 
part with what he took away, eager to receive 
what he gave. Most of my contemporaries had 
been overexposed to divine worship, and what 



182 Books and Things 

was most irksome in the Christianity then preva- 
lent in New England, a rather bleak inflexible 
Christianity, Matthew Arnold gently and in- 
sistently effaced. The Greece he bade us look 
to and learn from was not the Greece revealed 
to the youth of to-day by Gilbert Murray and 
Alfred Zimmern. It was quieter, simpler, more 
serene, more nearly stationary, marmor-sclwner. 
Its differences from our own epoch were less 
perplexing, its superiorities to our epoch more 
incontestable. Matthew Arnold's Greece was 
above all more edifying than Mr. Zimmern's or 
Mr. Gilbert Murray's. It was adequate to the 
task of seeing us safely through the contempo- 
rary world, of insuring us against being made 
dull by business or wild by passion. 

Seventeen is doubtless the proper age for a 
deliberate re-valuation of life. Matthew Arnold, 
who would have detested such a phrase, helped 
us re-value life not only by what he wrote but 
by what he was. We knew that he was inor- 
dinately busy, and that business had not dulled 
his brightness. We knew that neither passion 
nor anything else had made him wild. His 
serenity was indisputable. Looking back now, 



Matthew Arnold 183 

I rather marvel at our admiration of it. Only 
very mild youngsters could have been satisfied 
with a serenity which such a temperate tumult 
had preceded. His early desire to learn and to 
discriminate was reinforced so soon by a desire 
to teach that he hadn't much time left for 
tumult. He was a man in whom the didactic 
impulse, no matter what the substance of his 
teaching had been, would have said " Peace, be 
still," to his other impulses. We were oddly 
ready, it seems to me, to believe his other im- 
pulses as strong and as hard to manage as he 
thought them. We were a little slow to under- 
stand that one of the surest ways not to see life 
whole is to see it too steadily. We had been 
puzzled by his assertion that poetry is a criti- 
cism of life. Some of us thought it a hard say- 
ing. None of us realized how near Matthew 
Arnold came to believing that life itself is a 
criticism of life. 

" His foot is in the vera vita, his eye on the 
beatific vision." The vera vita Matthew Arnold 
looked forward to and worked for was an 
ordered life, equable, salutary, curious, humane, 
discriminating, led by men and women who had 



184 Books and Things 

plenty of time left for culture. Time left from 
what? From the unavoidable activities and rou- 
tines which he somewhat neglected. This neglect 
is one of the reasons why the present younger 
generation, knocking at the usual place, so sel- 
dom asks at the door for Mr. Matthew Arnold, 
who did not distinguish between the better 
ways and the worse, the more wholesome and 
the less, in which these unavoidable activities 
and routines may be pursued; who was incurious 
as to the possibility of reducing, for pretty much 
everybody, the proportion of life that must be 
given over to these activities. " The best man," 
so he quotes the Socrates of the Memorabilia, 
" is he who most tries to perfect himself." 
Nowadays the younger generation prefers to 
get its definition from Schopenhauer, who says 
the mark of a good man is " dass er weniger, als 
sonst geschiet, ein Unterschied macht zwischen 
sich und anderen." You must cure people of 
poverty before you can profitably set about 
teaching them the best that has been known and 
thought in the world. To make life as bearable 
for all of us as it now is for some of us — here, 
and not upon self-culture, our younger genera- 
tion puts its characteristic emphasis. 



Matthew Arnold 1 8$ 

Well, the next best thing to being young is 
remembering that youth was once our privilege. 
It is pleasant to remember, what Matthew 
Arnold did for some of us, who were young in 
the last century's eighties. He bettered our 
enjoyment of books. He made us feel, rather 
intimately, the presence or the absence of the 
grand style, natural magic, fluidity and sweet 
ease, the lyrical cry. He gave us the illusion 
that we too were incapable of confusing ele- 
gance and nobleness, of mistaking simplcssc for 
simplicitc. With what confidence we used to dis- 
tinguish, in those early days, between the best 
and the not quite so good! What days were 
those, Parmenides, when we scorned the at- 
tempt to put upon the tail of any bird any salt 
that was not Attic! Conscious as we then were 
of Greek aspirations and Greek avoidances, of 
a desire to recapture and to domesticate the 
accent of Greek prose, we were just beginning 
to be aware, uneasily, of giant shapes of dis- 
tance away in the north, of dim Russian and 
Scandinavian masters, portentous and modern, 
soon to grow distinct and unescapable, soon to 
make us forget the pure lines of Ionian horizons, 
the liquid clearness of Ionian skies. Surely it 



1 86 Books and Things 

honors Matthew Arnold that he was able to feel, 
almost at the end of his life, the new greatness 
of one of these northern masters, whose advent 
made us realize that the best that has been 
thought and said in the world is an unfinished 
thing. 
January, 1915. 



SWINBURNE 

DO undergraduates read Swinburne nowa- 
days? Judging from a sample chosen 
here and there I should say that they don't. 
They know " When the hounds of spring are on 
winter's traces," and " In a coign of the cliff 
between lowland and highland," and " Shall I 
strew on thee rose or rue or laurel," but they 
do not take long drinks of Swinburne, out of 
schooners, as we did between twenty-five and 
thirty years ago. I do not mean that even in 
my day all Harvard undergraduates read Swin- 
burne, or that even to the most decadent among 
us he was ever a major god. But we could read 
him in his own tongue, as we could not read 
Ibsen or Tolstoi, and he added to the excite- 
ments in life. The women with whom he 
brought us acquainted were brilliantly unlike 
the charming girls whom we took to football 
games or danced with, of a Saturday evening, 
at Papanti's, and who never appeared, no matter 
how oddly their mothers chose to dress them, 
either in raiment of dyed sendaline or clothed 

187 



1 88 Books and Things 

about with flame and tears. Along the water 
side of Beacon Street, in the late eighties, 
walked few feet shod with adder-skin. And in 
Swinburne the talk was different. I cannot re- 
member hearing a Harvard student tell his 
partner that she laughed " with a savor of blood 
in her face, and a savor of guile," or call her 
" my snake with bright bland eyes." In Boston 
and its environs the proportion of mystery was 
no doubt what it usually is where young women 
and young men are gathered together, but it 
was an innocent natural mystery. 

Sin was the specialty of the Swinburne who 
wrote " Poems and Ballads," the volume with 
which, as being the cause of most scandal and 
cry, we were naturally most familiar. We knew 
him as the young poet who had set the Thames 
on fire, in eighteen sixty-something, with his 
song. He fell among women, and " I say, 
Archer, my God, what women ! " Although 
they lived in a world so remote from ours that 
we could reach it only by a long leap, Swin- 
burne's rhythms furnished the necessary spring- 
board. He never degraded Lust by treating it 
as mere Love. By representing desire as a 



Swinburne 189 

thing of sin he enabled us, who had been taught 
to associate these two, to feel ourselves not so 
far from home after all. Thus in time we could 
habituate ourselves to his surprising women, 
who had subtle-colored hair, eyes like the eyes 
of a dove that sickeneth, mouths that made the 
blood beat in feverish rhymes, mouths like fer- 
vent amorous roses, and whose kisses were 
rapturous, venomous, poisonous and prolonged. 
These women lived in a land where the kisses 
that were given and received had fangs and bit 
and drew blood, and yet a certain restricted 
freedom of choice was open to us. Even here 
there were women and women. Not even here 
was every sin as scarlet. Monday, Wednesday 
and Friday, lips darker than purple kisses. 
Tuesday, Thursday and (at the pleasure of 
the lover) Saturday, the pallid lips of old 
Semiramisses. 

Sin was the many-colored garment in which 
these ladies, wrapping themselves about, sought 
to hide their monotony from our eyes. And so 
for a while we were illuded. It takes time to 
perceive the sad sameness of strange sins. It 
takes time to perceive the tedium of days. divided 



190 Books and Things 

thus: Sin, eight hours; sleep, eight hours; sun- 
dries, eight hours. The only way to tell these 
sinners apart was to consult the column marked 
" sundries," about which Swinburne had nothing 
to tell us. In " Le Prince d'Aurec," at a fancy 
dress ball, a lady got up as Marion Delorme 
makes her entrance with words like these : 
" Many men loved me, each in his own way ; and 
I loved them all, in the same way." When at 
last we saw that all his ladies were desperately 
the same in their loves we shut his book, we 
left behind his land of anapaests and dense air, 
we discovered that our own country had its 
good side, that we breathed deeply with ease 
in it, that after so much unrelieved heavy bright- 
ness its cooler and varied colors interested our 
eyes. But the best escape of all was from a 
routine strangeness out into a world where 
strangeness was accidental, welcome, unex- 
pected, and where no two strangenesses were 
alike. 

Is it because an older reader is offended by 
the sameness of Swinburne's women that Swin- 
burne is not easy to read continually nowadays? 
Partly for that reason, no doubt, and partly 



Swinburne 191 

because few older readers have kept a conscious- 
ness of sin. I often do things I wish I had not 
done, just as I leave undone things I ought to 
have written promptly and dropped in the mail- 
box. I am cowardly, procrastinating, evasive, 
slothful, but the nearest I ever come to feeling 
sinful is when I get a letter which looks like 
an assertion that my account is overdrawn, and 
which often turns out to be nothing but praise 
of some new beauty in the high-grade security 
line. Lacking the essential feeling, I sometimes 
feel, when I pick up " Poems and Ballads," first 
series, that the poet's purple and scarlet pas- 
sions hardly deserved to be called sins, that they 
are no more sinful than a gilt and plush sunset, 
and that a man who insists so much on the 
wickedness and shamefulness of his desires 
probably overestimates their strength. 

This explanation has the merit of accounting 
for the neglect of Swinburne by the present crop 
of undergraduates, many of whom have been 
brought up as if there were no such thing as sin 
in this universe. Not being equipped with the 
needful illusion, they find out sooner than we 
did that almost all Swinburne's intellectual jour- 
neys were only from heaven to hell, from lilies 



192 Books and Things 

to roses, from night to day, from life to death, 
from tyranny to liberty, and back again, and 
that upon none of these journeys did he see 
much that he hadn't noticed the first time. He 
did not make too much of these contrasts, but 
he made what he could of them too. often. 

Or else — is it possible — can it be — that the 
wise youth of to-day, knowing so many things 
so early, know this also in advance of experi- 
ence, namely, that wickedness, even in woman, 
is not the whole of life, and that the most un- 
chaste woman in the world may be otherwise 
uninteresting? Or perhaps it is Swinburne's lack 
of structure that repels them? Often you won- 
der, as you read on and on, whether his habit was 
not to start a poem with some fragment that oc- 
curred of itself, and then to make more frag- 
ments in the same metre, until his ear desired 
another metre, when he would take what he 
had written, choose a first stanza and a last, and 
let the others arrange themselves. What are 
they like, these long and structureless poems, as 
empty of meaning as of movement from mood 
to mood? They are like blown fires that spread 
without arriving, like champing swift horses 



Swinburne 193 

always in the same place, like huge elusive bel- 
lying sails that the mind cannot furl. The 
emptiness is filled with lines that call and clang, 
with a rushing wind of rhythm, with a musical 
movement repeated and repeated until it gets 
into one's blood, and the pulse beats to its 
measure, and long after the wind has blown 
itself out the waves keep up their rolling and 
washing. 

September, 1916. 



" THE WAY OF ALL FLESH " 

WHEN was the right moment to adver- 
tise one's liking for "The Way of All 
Flesh"? Shaw's preface to "Major Barbara" 
was not published until 1907. The second Eng- 
lish edition of Butler's novel was not published 
until 1908, and in the next year or so a few 
copies found their way to this country. These 
were still so few by 1910 or '11 that if you talked 
big about Butler people were not impressed. 
Nevertheless, there must have been a golden 
moment when the observers of " The Way of 
All Flesh " were still few enough to be distin- 
guished and already many enough to make 
themselves heard. This moment has gone. We 
are to-day that next generation whom Butler 
wrote for, and we find his novel easy to under- 
stand and a little old-fashioned and immensely 
stimulating. Here is the first American edition, 
published by Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Company, 
well printed, price a dollar and a half, a book to 
buy, to read, to keep and not to lend. 

On the paper cover which protects the blue 
194 



"The Way of All Flesh" 195 

cloth binding there is a quotation from Arnold 
Bennett, to whom Mr. Robert H. Davis had 
said : " Do you know a novel called ' The Way 
of All Flesh'?" And Mr. Bennett answered: 
" I do. It is one of the great novels of the 
world." Such praise is useful because coming 
from Mr. Bennett it makes people want to read. 
Such praise is harmless because Butler is so 
lively that after you have read a few pages you 
stop wondering why Mr. Bennett dragged 
greatness in. You forget that Butler's novel is 
unlike what you were led by Mr. Bennett's 
praise to expect. It is unlike any other novel 
either great or small. It is like a wise selec- 
tion from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 
arranged at first as a Pontifex family history 
and at the end as a biography of Ernest 
Pontifex. 

These Pontifexes, who started in a small way, 
rise into a higher air of public school, Cam- 
bridge, fixed incomes and holy orders. Most of 
the dramatis personae look safe enough if you 
judge them by their labels, but you soon dis- 
cover that the labels do not mean to Butler what 
they meant to most English novelists in 1880. 
His school teachers like teaching because it is 



196 Books and Things 



tyranny made easy, and not for any other rea- 
son. His young men take holy orders re- 
luctantly, because they have not courage enough 
and imagination enough to resist family pres- 
sure. His husbands and wives, who normally 
have married without love, endure each other 
well or ill, as the case may be. Parents dislike 
their children and never acknowledge to them- 
selves that this dislike exists and controls their 
decisions. Children are slow to acknowledge 
how sincerely they detest their parents. Small 
incomes look up admiringly to large incomes, 
and large incomes respect one another. Rare is 
the man who has the eye to perceive or the 
realism to own what he genuinely feels. 

Ernest Pontifex's career is a shock to his self- 
deceiving people. It begins in the ordinary way, 
it follows the ordinary routine through public 
school and Cambridge to holy orders, for which 
he has no turn. But after taking holy orders 
Ernest does and suffers strange things. He goes 
to prison for six months because, in the words 
of the judge who sentences him : " It is not likely 
that in the healthy atmosphere of such a school 
as Roughborough you can have come across 
contaminating influences; you were probably, I 



" The Way of All Flesh " 197 

may say certainly, impressed at school with the 
heinousness of any attempt to depart from the 
strictest chastity until such time as you had 
entered into a state of matrimony. . . . For 
the last four or five months you have been a 
clergyman, and if a single impure thought had 
still remained within your mind, ordination 
should have removed it; nevertheless, not only 
does it appear that your mind is as impure as 
though none of the influences to which I have 
referred had been brought to bear upon it, but it 
seems as though their only result had been this 
— that you have not even the common sense to 
be able to distinguish between a respectable girl 
and a prostitute." Soon after getting out of 
prison Ernest marries a prostitute named Ellen, 
who used to be his mother's maid, and with her 
sets up a small second-hand clothing shop. He 
is in despair when he learns that Ellen is a 
drunkard, and overjoyed when he learns that 
she has a husband living. When the novel 
closes Ernest is in possession of a fortune, he 
knows what he likes and what he dislikes, and 
he gives himself to the writing of unpopular 
books which a later generation will appreciate. 
But this happy ending is not arbitrary, for we 



198 Books and Things 

have known since page 168 that Ernest would 
come into a fortune at twenty-eight. 

This story is told and commented upon by an 
active-minded somebody who is Butler himself, 
who has Butler's humor and wit, his power of 
shrewd contentious observation, his surprising 
first-hand common sense. This narrator is the 
partisan of one point of view, Samuel Butler's 
own. To his habit of observing with his own 
eyes he owes his discovery that life is absolutely 
unlike what the romanticists and sentimentalists 
have told him about it, and his attention becomes 
the slave of this discovery. He literally cannot 
pay attention to any motive or any act or any 
feeling which might weaken his faith. For the 
romantic and the sentimental illusion he has 
substituted a hard-headed illusion of his own. He 
has the keenest nose for evidence that strength- 
ens his case, and in the presence of any other 
kind of evidence he loses his sense of smell. 
No other novelist with a mind has such an un- 
pliable mind. Life can no longer either astonish 
or puzzle him. It never contradicts itself. It 
is always the good dependable raw material for 
comment delivered in a voice quietly and uni- 
formly nipping. 



"The Way of All Flesh" 199 

Butler has excluded from his novel all those 
isolated mountain-top feelings which first gave 
the romanticists the tip for their convention 
that the levels are like the high spots. He has 
excluded everything indistinct. He does incline, 
to be sure, to the view " that it is our less con- 
scious thoughts and our less conscious actions 
which mainly mould our lives, and the lives of 
those who spring from us." I am not familiar 
enough with his other writings to know what 
this view did to his thinking, but it has done 
almost nothing to " The Way of All Flesh," 
where there is neither darkness nor dimness nor 
sudden light, where the same light falls equally 
upon all parts of a world as clear as one would 
be which contained only conscious actions and 
conscious thoughts. 

And yet, although Butler's self-made dissent 
from conventional beliefs does rather monoton- 
ously dictate to him, does keep him out of the 
class of perfectly free observers, the details of 
his dissent are endlessly amusing and original. 
Every now and then his observation sounds 
forced, but even if it never had been, and even 
if he had lived in a world about which nobody 
had ever told him any lies, he would still have 



200 Books and Things 

acquired the belief in which " The Way of All 
Flesh " is rooted. This belief, as valid for the 
real confusing world as for Butler's simplified 
world, is a belief that hardly anybody knows 
what he likes and how he feels, and that for 
everybody the beginning of wisdom is to find 
out. 
July, 1916. 



AN IMMORTAL WRITER 

IN the Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edi- 
tion, only forty-seven lines are given to Miss 
Marie Corelli, and only twenty to Mr. Hall 
Caine. Good, you say, for the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica. Ah, my guileless friend, " there did 
I wait for thee," with malice up my sleeve, 
knowing that this same work of reference says, 
in the article called "Caricature:" "The work 
of Mr. Max Beerbohm (' Max ') has the note of 
originality and extravagance too." In the 
article on English literature in the nineteenth 
century, in a paragraph called " Criticism," the 
Britannica says further: " Birrell, Walkley and 
Max Beerbohm have followed rather in the 
wake of the Stephens and Bagehot, who have 
criticized the sufficiency of the titles made out 
by the more enthusiastic and lyrical eulogists." 
Surely it was the fall of the dice that handed 
English literature in the nineteenth century 
over to a writer capable of such a remark. Pass, 
however, the stupidity in itself and consider only 
the space it occupies — four lines, by the most 

201 



202 Books and Things 

liberal estimate, given to Max Beerbohm, writer. 
Add the line and a half given to Max, cari- 
caturist, and you reach a total of five and a half 
lines, if the index volume may be trusted. 
Somewhat grotesque, isn't it? For of Max 
Beerbohm's prose you may safely predict that 
it will have the kind of immortality which he 
has predicted for Whistler's. " When I dub 
Whistler an immortal writer," he says, " I do 
but mean that so long as there are a few people 
interested in the subtler ramifications of English 
prose as an art form, so long will there be a 
few constantly recurring readers of ' The Gen- 
tle Art' " 

No one except himself can write of Max 
Beerbohm in just the appropriate tone. I sup- 
pose a bland irritation often animates the amuse- 
ment with which he reads what people say about 
him. Twice, so far as I remember, he has al- 
lowed this irritation to appear. Once when Mr. 
James Huneker called him a gentle mid-Vic- 
torian, or something of the sort; once when Mr. 
William Archer set forth his reasons for wish- 
ing a London morning daily would engage Max 
as dramatic critic. An innocent wish? That 



An Immortal Writer 203 

depends a little on the wisher, and Mr. Archer 
always goes armed with lethal weapons. It was 
Mr. Archer who advised Mr. Shaw to do fewer 
" You Never Can Tells," and more " Widowers' 
Houses." It was Mr. Archer who heard, through 
several acts of a play by Mr. Stephen Phillips, 
the younger Dumas speaking with the voice of 
Milton. But nothing said by Mr. Archer or Mr. 
Huneker, nothing I shall say to-day, can attain 
the perfection in inappropriateness of a speech 
made by Mr. James Pethel, when he and Mr. 
Beerbohm were on their way out of a cafe in 
Dieppe: "He asked me what I was writing 
now and said that he looked to me to ' do some- 
thing big, one of these days,' and that he was 
sure I had it 'in' me. This remark (though 
of course I pretended to be pleased by it) irri- 
tated me very much." Was I not right in think- 
ing that only Mr. Max Beerbohm could find the 
proper tone? 

"James Pethel," with whose peculiar person- 
ality a few pages in the January Century make 
us well acquainted, is also the title of a peculiar 
story, characteristic of Max Beerbohm in being 
Unlike his other stories, characteristic in its 



204 Books and Things 

mockery of the feeling it communicates, or 
hardly communicates, since it betrays the reader 
into an excitement the author never knew. The 
most exciting page of all, a description of 
riskiest motoring from Dieppe to Rouen, is also 
the page where the art of caricature is carried 
furthest. But the story is characteristic of Max 
Beerbohm not only in the touches it adds to 
one's picture of his gifts. By a humor always 
present and sometimes manifest, by strokes of 
preparation neither too heavy nor too light, by 
an almost masculine intuition into the essential 
virtue of words, by a verbal dexterity born of 
this insight, by unlabored ease in elegance, by 
a precision as happy as carelessness could hope 
to be, " James Pethel " resembles everything 
else Mr. Max Beerbohm writes nowadays. 
Twenty years ago, when he was hardly more 
than half his present age, the ease did not 
always prevail against the elegance, and many a 
mannered sentence would have died of precious- 
ness if he hadn't kept it alive by his mockery 
of its beauty. In Chicago, when he was twenty- 
three, he wrote of Walter Pater: "Not that 
even in those more decadent days of my child- 
hood did I admire the man as a stylist. Even 



An Immortal Writer 205 

t _ — __ ■ ■ 

then I was angry that he should treat English 
as a dead language, bored by the sedulous ritual 
wherewith he laid out every sentence as in a 
shroud — hanging, like a widower, long over its 
marmoreal beauty or ever he could lay it at 
length in his book, its sepulchre." Even then, 
however, Max Beerbohm seldom wrote so. 
Even then, he could write like this, of Thack- 
eray: "He blew on his pipe, and words came 
tripping round him like children, like pretty 
little children who are perfectly drilled for the 
dance, or came, did he will it, treading in their 
precedence, like kings, gloomily." 

There, by the grace of God, spoke an 
originator of rhythms proper to English prose, 
a young light-handed master of its other har- 
mony. The rhythm here is as original as this 
of Landor's, which of course you got by heart 
long since, leaning against your mother's knee, 
and which I never tire of tiring people by quot- 
ing: "There are no fields of amaranth on this 
side of the grave : there are no voices, O 
Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however 
tuneful : there is no name, with whatever em- 
phasis of passionate love repeated, of which the 



206 Books and Things 

echo is not faint at last." But not in stateliest 
Landor, in Max alone among the masters of 
cadence, will you find beauty bestowed on 
absurdest incident. Who else would turn the 
emptying of a pitcher from an upper window 
upon a man waiting below, into this : ' ' Come 
a little nearer,' she whispered. The upturned 
and moonlit face obeyed her. She saw its lips 
forming the word ' Zuleika.' She took careful 
aim. Full on the face crashed the cascade of 
moonlit water, shooting out on all sides like the 
petals of some great silver anemone." 

His ear is as sensitive to silver as his eye. 
You recall his noon in Oxford? "Some clock 
clove with silver the stillness of the morning. 
Ere came the second stroke, another and nearer 
clock was striking. And now there were others 
chiming in. The air was confused with the 
sweet babel of its many spires, some of them 
booming deep, measured sequences, some tink- 
ling impatiently and outwitting others which 
had begun before them. And when this 
anthem of jealous antiphonies and uneven 
rhythms had dwindled quite away and fainted 
in one last solitary note of silver, there started 



An Immortal Writer 207 

somewhere another sequence; and this, almost 
at its last stroke, was interrupted by yet another, 
which went on to tell the hour of noon in its 
own way, quite slowly and significantly, as 
though none knew it." He has taught words to 
reveal a beauty in things comic, the humor in 
other things. He has seen his world with deco- 
rative humor and decorative insight. He has 
made his world clearer by arranging it in his 
own pattern. With his own taste as his court 
of last resort, among so many contemporaries 
trying to be themselves, he has tranquilly said 
what he felt, serenely himself without trying. 

January, 1915. 



LATER GEORGE MOORE 

AN elderly egotist has written three volumes 
of malicious reminiscences. That is a 
true statement about George Moore's " Hail 
and Farewell." It is also an absurdly misleading 
statement. 

The reminiscences are not like ordinary 
reminiscences. Wishing to make portraits of 
his friends, George Moore sits down and con- 
sults his memory. When memory yields just 
the characteristic saying or doing that he needs 
in his picture he seeks no further. When 
memory is stingy he invents. With nicest 
craftsmanship he keeps the remembered things 
and the invented things in the same key. His 
sitters may declare that they never said this or 
never did that, and they may be right. It does 
not matter. Nobody who is not acquainted 
with them, at first or second hand, can tell the 
invented bits from the remembered. Both kinds 
help to make the pictures superb examples of 
Kleinmeisterei. 

The malice is not like ordinary malice. It is 
208 



Later George Moore 209 

George Moore's indispensable color. Without 
it he simply cannot paint. Whether his malice 
is claro or Colorado or maduro, it never exists 
for its own sake. There is claro malice in the 
portrait of Edward Martyn, but there is also 
tenderness and love. Moore has dutchpainted 
Martyn in the round, colored and solid, short 
legs in queer trousers, the room over the tobac- 
conist's, the passion for Palestrina, the queer 
candles Martyn reads Ibsen by, all the friendly 
kinks and creases of his mind. There is 
Colorado malice in the portrait of Yeats — his 
height and his hands, the adjusted drapery of 
his intellect, his figured speech and wise — but 
there is also a very real admiration. There is 
maduro malice in the portraits of Plunkett and 
Gill, but there is also lighthearted fun. 

The egotism is not like ordinary egotism. 
George Moore shows us George Moore inter- 
rupting AE, George Moore interrupting Yeats, 
George Moore interrupting Colonel Maurice 
Moore, George Moore interrupting John Eglin- 
ton. He knows that such an inveterate inter- 
rupter must bore his friends. Down goes the 
evidence against himself just the same. He 
shows us the friendship between Lady Gregory 



210 Books and Things 

and Yeats as admirably sound on the whole, 
shows it slightly comic in parts, shows it mak- 
ing George Moore jealous and petulant. He 
puts in the jealousy and the petulance because 
they give definition to Lady Gregory's liking 
for Yeats, and because he needs them in his 
malicious portrait of George Moore. 

This is a very special brand of egotism. 
Hardly a word in praise of George Moore is set 
down. Many rufflings of his vanity are re- 
corded. It is not a devouring egotism. It 
doesn't always come to the table three regular 
times a day, but it does a good deal of nibbling 
between meals. George Moore's interest in 
himself doesn't shrink his power to observe 
other men. He observes while he is in the act 
of interrupting. This egotist, who is all the 
time looking at himself in the glass, sees other 
people a good half of the time. 

George Moore has made a lifelong attempt 
to know himself, and he has almost succeeded. 
Almost everything concerning himself, from 
his love of Manet to the queer figure George 
Moore cuts in his pajamas, he records and 
understands. But one part of himself he mis- 
understands totally. He has no idea how fool- 



Later George Moore 211 

m i ' 1 ,i. . ii i i . 1 

ish it was of him to enter himself for the stand- 
ing and running broad generalization prize. 
The passages of sustained ratiocination are the 
only grotesques in the three volumes of " Hail 
and Farewell." He is rich in the small change 
of thought: he should never try to think con- 
secutively. His self-knowledge has one other 
odd defect. He thinks it was his sympathy with 
the Boers in the South African war that drove 
him out of England and instigated the breakage 
of several old friendships. His mood at this 
time, in his own opinion, was harsh and bitter 
and savage and unrelenting and ferocious. He 
was stirred to the depths. All self-delusion, you 
understand. George Moore was fussed. That 
was all. 

One other self-delusion is worth noting. It 
is hard to define, but its effect is plain. It has 
led George Moore to insert a few coarse and a 
few over-intimate passages in " Hail and Fare- 
well." Their presence raises no moral question. 
It raises no aesthetic question. They are neither 
more nor less than bad smells. 

Their sole function is to put an edge on our 
wonder that the man who wrote them wrote 
also such sentences as- these: "Not a wind 



212 Books and Things 

stirred in the tall grass, nor was there a cloud 
in the sky; a dim gold fading into gray and into 
blue, darkening overhead. A ghostly moon 
floated in the south, and the blue sailless sea 
was wound about the shoulders of the hills like 
a scarf." Or this: "We returned through the 
hilly country, with the wide, sloping evening 
above us, and apple-trees lining the road, all 
the apples now reddened and ready for gather- 
ing." Or this : " I had expected him to answer 
' Cologne,' where we had stopped before to hear 
a contrapuntal Mass; two choirs, as well as I 
remember, answering each other from different 
sides of the cathedral, the voices dividing and 
uniting, seeking each other along and across the 
aisles." The first quotation is a little trite at 
the start, but doesn't it end in loveliness? And 
doesn't the creator of the last two know some- 
thing about the rhythms of English prose? 

An equal beauty is suffused over the longer 
landscape passages. George Moore is a true 
landscape painter. His recollections of Irish 
country are little gentle marvels of composition. 
They seem, as he might say if the pictures were 
by another hand, to have been breathed upon 
the page. Add to these and to the portraits 



Later George Moore 213 

of persons, when you are counting his good 
points, the narrative art which makes many 
greater men's narrative sound harsh and jerky 
by comparison; add the consummate skill of his 
spacing, a skill which ordains that the landscapes 
shall never be too few or too frequent for the 
portraits and the dialogue. 

A reader who isn't curious about technical 
questions, about prose as an art, about narra- 
tive as an art, will never get out of George 
Moore the best that is there. But we may easily 
acquire the curiosity; it doesn't take much mind. 
All the rest of George Moore may be enjoyed 
without any mind at all. Reading him gives 
many readers impious little feelings of freedom. 
He has labored with zest to restrict the area 
of the unmentionable. He has added several 
to the list of mentionable things. He has 
helped enormously to break down the conven- 
tion which says to an artist: " You are welcome 
to do your friends in bronze or marble or 
pastel or oil. You must let them alone if your 
medium happens to be words. You mustn't try 
to put their actions and talk into print." 

" Hail and Farewell " is a by-product. Moore 
was lured back to Ireland by his yearning to be 



214 Books and Things 

in the movement, to bear his part in the attempt 
to revive Irish letters and drama. The " move- 
ment " never took him to its bosom. It pre- 
ferred, very wisely, Yeats and Lady Gregory 
and Synge; leaving George Moore free to write 
these volumes for his own pleasure and ours. 
He has done no better writing. Landscape and 
wistfulness and portraiture and even wit are 
harmonized here into the easiest narrative. 
Never has George Moore, Kleinmeister, ap- 
peared so easily master of his art. 

November, 1914. 



HENRY JAMES'S QUALITY 

ALTHOUGH it was Henry James's good 
fortune, until almost the end of his life, 
to keep coming nearer and nearer mastery of 
his special world as it grew richer and more 
intricate and harder to master, yet this world 
was ever the same place of tradition and ap- 
pearances, of relations and perception. 

We have found out something about a writer 
when we have noticed his attitude toward love 
or time. The lapse of time was told to Rossetti 
by the sea's sound, which men have always 
heard and always will hear. Nothing so un- 
changeable spoke of time to Henry James. He 
did not feel it as either an island in eternity or 
as a path into the future. Time interests him 
because it has given their tone to pleasant 
houses set in English country and English 
leisure, or looking down at Italian cities, because 
it enables man to make a long stay in one spot, 
because it obliterates rawness and newness. 
For him it is the maker of tradition, without 

215 



216 Books and Things 

which he does not conceive life as possible in 
the high manner and on the great scale. 

With tradition he knew from the first how to 
deal so well that even for him the chances were 
slight of his learning to deal with it better. 
One might say almost as much about his way of 
dealing with appearances. From the Florentine 
or Roman landscape in " The Portrait of a 
Lady" (1881) to the Venetian landscape in 
"The Wings of the Dove" (1902) the progress 
is less obvious than from the earlier to the later 
picture of personal relations. The later land- 
scapes are more brilliant, more achieved, more 
done, but their superiority shows even more 
sharply in the use Henry James puts them to, 
as matching or illustrating something in human 
character or predicament or mood. His later 
fullness of power over the external world is re- 
vealed with splendor in those large metaphors 
which rise above the horizon and flush the con- 
sciousness of his men and women with unfor- 
gettable color. The Princess, in " The Golden 
Bowl," is looking in through the window at the 
table where her father is sitting, and her hus- 
band, and the woman who is her father's wife 
and her husband's mistress. She wonders why 



Henry James's Quality 217 

» — , __ 

" she had been able to give herself so little, 
from the first, to the vulgar heat of her wrong. 
She might fairly, as she watched them, have 
missed it as a lost thing; have yearned for it, 
for the straight vindictive view, the rights of 
resentment, the rages of jealousy, the protests 
of passion, as for something she had been 
cheated of not least: a range of feelings which 
for many women would have meant so much, 
but which for her husband's wife, for her father's 
daughter, figured nothing nearer to experience 
than a wild eastern caravan, looming into view 
with crude colors in the sun, fierce pipes in the 
air, high spears against the sky, all a thrill, a 
natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short 
before it reached her and plunging into other 
defiles." 

As a man whose use of words has always told 
his curiosity about them, and whose patience 
gains a knowledge of their original meaning, 
comes little by little to use them so as to bring 
out their shyer and less audible tones, so Henry 
James's insight into human relations grew more 
penetrating, and his invention of ways to render 
what he saw grew almost as much. 

Readers who agree in rating his latest novels 



218 Books and Things 

i — , _ __ — , 

higher than his earlier would also, I suppose, 
agree in saying that nowhere has he created 
more complicated and exquisite relations, no- 
where has he explored them more exhaustively, 
than in " The Awkward Age," " The Wings of 
the Dove," " The Ambassadors " and " The 
Golden Bowl." In each of these books his main 
concern is with " the great constringent human 
relation between man and woman at once at its 
maximum and as the relation most worth while 
in life for either party." The quotation is from 
a lecture he gave in 1912, when he said also 
that in " The Ring and the Book " Browning 
offered us this relation " always and ever as the 
thing absolutely most worth while." Ten years 
earlier, in an essay on d'Annunzio, he had said 
of sexual passion : " From the moment it de- 
pends on itself alone for its beauty it endangers 
extremely its distinction, so precarious at the 
best. . . . What the participants do with their 
agitation, in short, or even what it does with 
them, that is the stuff of poetry, and it is never 
really interesting save when something finely 
contributive in themselves makes it so." 

For Henry James nothing so endangered this 
passion's distinction as facility, as the loose easy 



Henry James's Quality 219 

dirigibility of its turnings from mistress to mis- 
tress, from lover to lover. Its justification, its 
beauty and dignity, must be missing unless the 
fire were lighted before one altar only, unless it 
burned there with an intensity that gave prom- 
ise of its being perpetual. So deep a distrust 
of facility is also a positive need, felt by him 
on behalf of his men and women in love, of 
obstacles and difficulties across the way to com- 
plete possession. He has not painted for us the 
passion which is free to begin and to continue 
in the open, which travels the beaten road of 
marriage under the indifferent approving eyes 
of all the world. He seems to regard the maxi- 
mum of intensity as impossible where there is 
neither danger nor any reason for secrecy. 

According to the more usual opinion a pas- 
sion that has its reasons for secrecy can almost 
never escape baseness. In Henry James we are 
often invited to feel that the necessary sacrifices, 
of scruple, of good faith, of elementary straight- 
ness and Tightness of relation precisely where 
the lovers are most bound to go straight, serve 
to measure the passion's intensity and to justify 
the lovers in giving right of way to their central 
loyalty. Any one's moral code, no matter what 



220 Books and Things 

else it consists of, is sure to contain an article 
forbidding us to treat a human being as a con- 
venience, and another forbidding us to pretend 
while doing this that we are doing something 
else. Both articles are violated in the four- 
novels I have named, but to call the result 
merely base and cruel would be absurd. The 
price paid is high : it is not exorbitant. In the 
moral world which Henry James cares for, the 
lovers somehow save their dignity by being 
imaginative and considerate, by being above all 
what he most wanted to have them, " distin- 
guished " through their prodigious ability to 
perceive. Deeds are to be estimated, he would 
have us understand, largely by the kind of 
existence they have in the doer's consciousness. 
A doing wrong which is accompanied and con- 
ditioned by the most sensitive perception of 
other people's spiritual needs may easily be a 
richer moral good than a strict straight road of 
obvious duty, followed by plodders who are in- 
sensitive, unperceiving, blinded and benumbed 
by the mere weary miles of their march. 

Nearly everything ministers to the distinction 
of Henry James's men and women, their sur- 
faces, their bodily felicity, their capacity for 



Henry James's Quality 221 

being refined by joy and by torment, yet one 
thing, throughout each of his four supreme 
novels, wages against this distinction a most 
curious war. I refer to that remorseless inquisi- 
tiveness which satisfies itself, for our enlighten- 
ment no less than for the inquisitor's own, but 
terribly more to our perplexity than to theirs, 
by questions of which the explicit insistence is 
hard to reconcile with any remotest regard for 
the questioners' own notions of distinction. And 
remarkable indeed, as a measure of the extent 
to which Henry James can make us care for 
the things he specially cares for, is the fact that 
we resent less the almost universal failure of 
everybody to act upon wishes not understood 
and appraised with unreal clearness by the 
wishers, than we resent that persistent question- 
ing so oddly offered to us by their creator as no 
violation of their own high code. 

Each of his later novels is peopled by protago- 
nists who watch themselves and one another, 
and by minor characters who watch the pro- 
tagonists sleeplessly. They are not more inter- 
ested than I, these minor characters, in the 
great relation we are studying together with 
such minuteness, yet their preoccupation makes 



222 Books and Things 

me as uneasy as I might be on finding, while 
reading a breathless detective story, that the 
author had introduced several persons whose 
chief function was to sit up half the night in 
order to finish it. 

The presence of these vigilant questioning 
satellites, in three of Henry James's greatest 
novels, has the additional disadvantage of leav- 
ing the protagonists without enough of such 
companionship as they would naturally desire 
and have. Except for " the great constringent 
relation " which absorbs them, and for the 
other relations which most sharply conflict with 
it, Merton Densher and the Prince, Maggie and 
Charlotte Sant and Kate Croy, strike one as 
leading lives that are strangely lacking in ade- 
quate friendships. Only in " The Awkward 
Age," in the society where we meet Nanda and 
Mrs. Brook, Mitchy and Vanderbank, do the 
companionable elements seem as richly supplied 
as the others. Nothing in " The Awkward 
Age " is finer than the relation, in " The Wings 
of the Dove," of Kate Croy and Milly and 
Densher, or than the relation of Maggie to her 
father in " The Golden Bowl." But the world 
of " The Awkward Age " has more dimensions, 



Henry James's Quality 223 

it is more populous, more of the inhabitants 
are worthy to breathe its air. One likes to 
remember that Henry James came in the end 
to understand the position of this masterpiece. 
Only two years ago he wrote, in " The New 
Novel": "It is no less apparent that the novel 
may be fundamentally organized — such things as 
' The Egoist ' and ' The Awkward Age ' are 
there to prove it." I am glad that he had this 
feeling about what he had done, and that he did 
not leave us ignorant of a self-estimate in which 
he must have found consolation and reward. 
March, 1916. 



" THE MIDDLE YEARS " 

SINCE the " Turn of the Screw," which fas- 
tened me in the habit of reading as it 
came out every new book by Henry James, 
I have had several moments of reaction against 
his way of looking at life and his way of 
writing English. " In the Cage " gave me one 
of these moments. Reading it was like watch- 
ing Henry James watching through a knot- 
hole somebody who was watching somebody 
else through a knot-hole. " The Sacred Fount," 
to take another example, was a book to shake 
the faith of the faithful. For weeks after 
reading it I hoped and prayed I might never 
again be exposed to novels of country house 
adultery. Another moment of rebellion is the 
present, when I have been reading " The Middle 
Years," not the story but the fragment of auto- 
biography named after the story. I am glad it 
has been published, there are things in it one 
would on no account have missed, portraits in 
different scales of Swinburne, Renan, Browning, 

224 



"The Middle Years" 225 

Lewes, George Eliot, Tennyson, Mrs. Greville, 
Lady Waterford. But it makes me feel that 
Henry James took with him to England, as a 
young man of twenty-five, a state of mind which 
would have been forgivable if it had been tem- 
porary, and which lasted forever after. On a 
March day in 1870 he arrived at Liverpool in a 
condition of anxious receptivity, and so he con- 
tinued until the end. Like Coventry Patmore's 
lover, who kept on suing and wooing long after 
" all is won that hope can ask," Henry James 
kept up his nervous courtship of England. For 
years he and England lived together on what, 
had the anxious husband been able to remember 
that he was no longer bridegroom or fiance on 
probation, might have been terms of placid 
connubial friendship, but he never got used to 
her. Something about her, something storied or 
even something finished and fashionable, some 
attitude which marked her as belonging to a 
greater world than his, provoked him ever to 
pursue. England lived at her ease with Henry 
James: he lived with her in a sacred twitter. 

" This doom of inordinate exposure to ap- 
pearances, aspects, images, every protrusive 



226 Books and Things 

item almost in the great beheld sum of things, 
I regard in other words as having settled upon 
me once for all while I observed for instance 
that in England the plate of buttered muffin and 
its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl 
after hot water had been ingenuously poured 
into the same, and had seen that circumstance 
in a perfect cloud of accompaniments." Trop 
de beau style, says a French critic, after reading 
one of Zola's heavy-laden descriptions of a 
table set for luncheon, trop de beau style pour 
des prunes. So in this case. Too fine and 
laborious a receptivity, too rich a cloud of ac- 
companiments, for a plate of buttered muffin. 
From the perusal of such a passage I rise and 
shout something about " the need of a world of 
men for me." When I find Henry James re- 
membering the exact number of times he had 
been asked out to breakfast in the United States 
of America, up to March, 1870, I exclaim: 
" Teach him rather to forget." To Henry 
James, my irritation tells me, life Avas too much 
" the great adventure of sensibility," and too 
little anything else. In London " the com- 
monest street-vista was a fairly heart-shaking 
contributive image." In London, after one of 



"The Middle Years" 227 

his adventures in sensibility, he " cherished for 
the rest of the day the peculiar quality of my 
vibration." Now, though I yield to none, and 
so forth, there are moments, and this is one of 
them, when passages like these make me long 
to pack my grip and go to some place where 
men do not cherish or discriminate their vibra- 
tions, where men do things and think only for 
the sake of doing them, where they butt one 
another off the sidewalk without apology, where 
they eat pie and steak for breakfast. Take me 
out of this world of sensibility, I cry, take me 
into the world where men hustle and loaf and 
spit on the floor. 

And the way of writing? Don't let us hunt 
out something special, let us take what we hap- 
pen to find, not forgetting of course that Henry 
James did not revise his first dictated draft of 
" The Middle Years ": " What was the secret of 
the force of that suggestion? — which was not, 
I may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the 
further observation of cases and conditions. 
Was it that the enormous ' pull ' enjoyed at 
every point of the general surface the stoutness 
of the underlying belief in what was behind all 



228 Books and Things 

surfaces? " Compare these, which for their dic- 
tating author are rather plain, with two sen- 
tences, written about the time of which Henry 
James is speaking, by another observer of Eng- 
lish life: "Your middle class man thinks it the 
highest pitch of development and civilization 
when his letters are carried twelve times a day 
from Islington to Camberwell, and from Cam- 
berwell to Islington, and if railway trains run 
to and fro between them every quarter of an 
hour. He thinks it is nothing that the trains 
only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at 
Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camber- 
well; and the letters only tell him that such is 
the life there." Or go back from Matthew 
Arnold's prose, back a hundred years to the 
prose of Fielding. Leaving all other biog- 
raphers who have told the lives of great and 
worthy persons, Fielding turns to " Colley Cib- 
ber's Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber " and 
to " Pamela " : " But I pass by these and many 
others to mention two books lately published, 
which represent an admirable pattern of the 
amiable in either sex. The former of these, 
which deals in male virtue, was written by the 
great person himself, who lived the life he hath 



"The Middle Years" 229 

recorded, and is by many thought to have lived 
such a life only in order to write it." 

It is in the eighteenth century, most of all, 
that the style of " The Middle Years " makes 
one want to stay. I believe I'll stay there for 
a while, reading Swift and Goldsmith and Defoe, 
until I have had time to relapse into homesick- 
ness for the modern, until I miss the " inspira- 
tion caught from subtler hues." 

December, 191 7. 



RICHARD THE LION-HARDING 

FROM the outset of his career, when he was 
writing stories curiously accomplished for 
so young a man, it has been Mr. Richard Hard- 
ing Davis's misfortune to excite in many of his 
many readers a slight prejudice against him. 
The years have not weakened this prejudice, 
although they should have. When a writer is 
fifty, or thereabouts, and has published many 
self-revealing volumes, you may or may not like 
him, but prejudice ought long ago to have dis- 
appeared. 

In Mr. Davis's case the operation of prejudice 
is easily described. Toward the end of one of 
his books you come across a passage which may 
be taken, let us suppose, in either of two senses. 
You promptly take it in the sense less favorable 
to Mr. Davis. Prejudice inclines you to this 
less favorable interpretation, and it is the 
author himself, in earlier passages, who has un- 
wittingly prepared you to understand the later 
passage as he never meant it to be understood. 

It is easy to find examples of this in " With 
230 



Richard the Lion-Harding 231 

the Allies." Mr. Davis is praising the work done 
by certain Americans in Paris : " At the resi- 
dence of Mr. Herrick, in the rue Francois Pre- 
mier, there was an impromptu staff composed 
chiefly of young American bankers, lawyers and 
business men. They were men who inherited, 
or who earned, incomes of from twenty thou- 
sand to fifty thousand a year, and all day and 
every day, without pay, and certainly without 
thanks, they assisted their bewildered, penniless 
and homesick fellow countrymen." Mr. Davis 
does not intend to imply that the nobleness of 
such conduct varies with the size of the income. 
He does not intend to imply that the nobleness 
is the same whether the income be dependent 
upon the young banker's exertions or inherited 
and continuous. Yet an unsympathetic reader 
is, by the time he reaches this passage, prepared 
to seek and find both implications. 

Mr. Davis is a genuine admirer of courage, 
chivalry toward women and undemonstrative- 
ness. He has an unaffected natural talent for 
praising them in words which inspire one with 
a passing distaste for these good things. Have 
you never, although you may be rather chival- 
rous yourself, in a modest way, risen from the 



232 Books and Things 

perusal of Mr. Davis on chivalry with a deter- 
mination never again, no matter how infirm the 
woman standing in front of you might be, or 
how heavy-laden, to rise from your seat in the 
car for her sake? And instead of thanking him 
for releasing you from the bondage of chivalry, 
haven't you sometimes been rather annoyed 
with him for cheapening chivalry by his praise? 

Fortunately for chivalry, there is next to noth- 
ing about it in " With the Allies." There is, 
however, and unavoidably, much about courage. 
Mr. Davis describes with vividness the un- 
demonstrative curt courage of British officers, 
and somehow you get a picture not only of this 
courage, but also of Mr. Davis himself, sitting 
opposite each curtly courageous British officer, 
filling himself with an admiration which will 
overflow by and by, in romantic eulogy of 
courage so undemonstrative. 

Of Mr. Davis's own courage, which is the real 
thing, which has been proved over and over 
again all over the world, there is in " With the 
Allies," as in all his other books, neither ro- 
mantic eulogy, nor any eulogy whatever. Some- 
thing deeper than prejudice against Mr. Davis, 
some meanness in one's own grain, is the only 



Richard the Lion-Harding 233 

valid explanation of sneers at him for letting us 
know, indirectly, that he is a brave man. In 
no way can a war correspondent whose heart 
is in his work avoid imparting this kind of 
information. 

There is nevertheless, in Mr. Davis's attitude 
toward his own courage, something subtly self- 
contradictory. One gets, along with a convic- 
tion that he is brave, and a conviction that he 
sincerely wishes never to boast of this fact, a 
hint here and there of a hardly conscious wish 
to let us know that if the hour struck for him he 
too would die like an English gentleman, with- 
out pose, laconically, sans phrase, as part of the 
day's work, as a matter of course. One suspects 
him, in his own case, of wanting us to value at 
its true worth a courage which he is too good 
an English gentleman to value so highly. He 
really possesses many of the fine qualities he 
praises in other men, and he seems dimly uneasy 
under the yoke of a code which does not permit 
him to praise these qualities wherever they are 
found. 

As for this code, so special and so highly 
esteemed, one infers that it does not preclude 
an occasional reference to the war correspond- 



234 Books and Things 

ent's own predicament: "Maxim's, which now 
reminds one only of the last act of ' The Merry 
Widow,' was the meeting-place for the French 
and English officers from the front; the Ameri- 
can military attaches from our embassy, among 
whom were soldiers, sailors, aviators, marines; 
the doctors and volunteer nurses from the 
American ambulance, and the correspondents 
who by night dined in Paris and by day dodged 
arrest and other things on the firing-line, or as 
near it as they could motor without going to 
jail." 

Maxim's, and the life there in war time, make 
Mr. Davis almost reflective. " When the Eng- 
lish officers are granted leave of absence," he 
writes, " they . . . motor into Paris for a bath 
and lunch. At eight they leave the trenches 
along the Aisne and by noon arrive at Maxim's, 
Voisin's or Larue's. Seldom does war present 
a sharper contrast. From a breakfast of ' bully ' 
beef, eaten from a tin plate, within their nostrils 
the smell of campfires, dead horses and un- 
washed bodies, they find themselves seated on 
red velvet cushions, surrounded by mirrors and 
walls of white and gold, and spread before them 
the most immaculate silver, linen and glass. 



Richard the Lion-Harding 235 

And the odors that assail them are those of 
truffles, white wine and ' artichaut sauce mous- 
selinc.' " . Mr. Davis finds the contrast not only 
sharp. He finds it more significant, subtly 
sweeter and dearer, than some of us can find it, 
no matter how hard we try. In his eyes, one 
imagines, it's a contrast of which the British 
privates could give only an inferior imitation if 
they should leave the trenches at eight, travel 
third class to Paris, lunch amid the complicated 
odors of an etablissement Duval, or drink, at one 
of the prix fixe places, vin compris. 

Cleanly bred English gentlemen, well edu- 
cated, finely trained, who know how to risk 
their lives quietly, without phrases or fuss, and 
how to order a meal— we read a good deal about 
them in " With the Allies," and as we read we 
trace our slight prejudice against Mr. Davis 
to its source, to our suspicion that in his eyes 
physical courage is not very much more impor- 
tant than good form in courage, that he over- 
rates the code which defines correctness on the 
battlefield for the members of a laconic polo- 
playing class. 

A perfect day, for Mr. Davis, would consist 
of a morning's danger, taken as a matter of 



236 Books and Things 

course; in the afternoon a little chivalry, equally 
a matter-of-course to a well-bred man; then a 
motor dash from hardship to some great city, 
a bath, a perfect dinner nobly planned. Shrap- 
nel, chivalry, sauce moussclinc , and so to work 
the next morning on an article which praised 
in others virtues his code compels him almost to 
ignore in himself. Richard Coeur-de-Lion 
would not have disliked such a day, once he was 
used to shrapnel. 
January, 1915. 



VICTOR CHAPMAN'S LETTERS 

PASCAL bids us imagine a number of men 
in chains, and all under sentence of death. 
Every day some of them are chosen, and their 
throats are cut in sight of the others. Those 
who are still alive see their own fate in that of 
their companions. They look one upon the 
other in pain and without hope, awaiting their 
turn. This, says Pascal, is a picture of man's 
predicament. The truth of this picture, from 
which we turn our eyes during most of the days 
of our life, is not so easily disregarded in the 
days of war. To the men at the front death 
may be near in time or far off. They cannot 
tell. But this they do know, that for each of 
them death is only a few inches distant. 

Among all the realities of war this nearness 
of death is the easiest for stay-at-homes to 
imagine. Any one can imagine it, can imagine 
it almost vividly, who has known fear. There 
is a greater difference between our pictures of 

237 



238 Books and Things 

war's other realities and the things themselves 
— the monotony, the lack of privacy, the torn 
bodies, the scattered fragments of men, the 
rains, the mud, the noises of agony, the stench, 
the hopes defeated. Yet one may doubt whether 
our imaginings differ more widely from the 
realities than these realities differ to the atten- 
tion and the perception of different men at the 
front. One soldier sees in war what a pacifist 
orator guesses at. Another, the author of those 
" Lettres d'un Soldat " which Miss Sergeant re- 
vealed to us, a few weeks ago, in the New 
Republic, trains his will and his attention until 
he can ignore many of the realities by which 
other soldiers are obsessed, until he can keep his 
mind, for hours together, upon beauty in the 
visible world, and upon doing his work. 

Life at the front, to the author of those let- 
ters, was a triumph of the will, a daily and 
hourly effort not to hear and not to see, an equal 
effort to see and to do. Victor Chapman re- 
sembled this young French soldier in his love 
of landscape: both were brave men: the resem- 
blance stops there. A sense of effort is the last 
thing you feel in reading Chapman's letters. 



Victor Chapman's Letters 239 

He was happier at the front than he had ever 
been before the war, happier as a member of 
the Franco-American Aviation Corps than he 
had been in the Foreign Legion. " Victor never 
really felt that he was alive," Mr. John Jay 
Chapman says in the Memoir of his son, " ex- 
cept when he was in danger. Nothing else 
aroused his faculties. This was not conscious, 
but natal — a quality of the brain. As some peo- 
ple need oxygen, so Victor needed danger. 
. . . His pleasure was in scenery. If you could 
place him in a position of danger and let him 
watch scenery, he was in heaven. I do not 
think he was ever completely happy in his life 
till the day he got his flying papers." 

Victor Chapman was killed at Verdun, on 
June 23, 1916, while flying over the German 
lines. Less than a week earlier he had been 
wounded, but had withstood all attempts to 
send' him to Paris for a rest, or to a hospital. 
His captain, by promising him a new and better 
machine, persuaded him to take things easily 
for a few days, on each of which Chapman would 
fly over to a hospital, carrying oranges to a 
friend who lay wounded there. On the after- 



240 Books and Things 

noon of the 23d he followed three of his com- 
panions, Captain Thenault, Prince and Lufbery, 
to the lines, meaning to stay only a little while 
and then go on to the hospital. Finding his 
friends outnumbered he dived among the Ger- 
man machines, and soon afterward his own, a 
Nieuport, was seen to fall. He was twenty-six 
years old, had been a pilot since February of the 
same year, and had spent a year in the trenches. 
" For over one hundred consecutive days," Mr. 
Chapman writes, " Victor was in the front 
trenches as aide-chargeur to a mitrail. He was 
slightly wounded once, and one-half of his 
squadron was either killed or seriously hurt." 
Although he knew what risks he ran, and had 
said, three days before his death, " Of course 
I shall never come out of this alive," his letters 
leave upon one the impression of a man who 
not only took danger as a matter of course, but 
who thought of it only when assuring his 
parents that there was none. " One is as safe," 
he writes to his father from the trenches, " as 
in any other walk of life. These whistling balls 
can be compared to microbes in the air. There 
are thousands, but if the proper precautions are 
taken one is no more imperiled than from small- 



Victor Chapman's Letters 24I 

pox or pneumonia. The danger was when we 
first arrived. No one knew the lay of the land, 
where it was suicidal and where not. But now 
every one knows the ropes." Chapman was 
reluctant to admit that danger was danger until 
it was past. 

His letters express his passion for landscape, 
for the French countryside he could look down 
on, for the clouds near which he was so much at 
home. He had his joy in the air and in fighting. 
Privation did not exist to his attention. Danger 
was the element he breathed most easily. It is 
impossible not to feel, as one reads the Letters 
and the Memoir, that Victor Chapman was a 
prisoner on this earth at peace; that he escaped, 
exulting and grave, into war and the sky. 
Friends must have realized who knew him as a 
boy, solitary and daring and generous, with his 
deep melancholy and his capacity for never for- 
getting his dead, that whatever his fate might 
be it could not be commonplace. He and his 
mother come to life again, and will live with 
a tragic intensity forever, in this Memoir, where 
Mr. Chapman speaks of them with a passion of 
candor that is lonelier than any reticence. 



242 Books and Things 

War is not romance for most soldiers, nor 
fighting the satisfaction of an ideal passion. 
Some moment when we realize this to the exclu- 
sion of other realities, when we have forgotten 
the exception in the rule, when we come near 
denying that characters so unusual as Victor 
Chapman's exist in contemporary flesh and 
blood, that will be one of the moments to take 
up and re-read this book, to be reminded that 
antique fortitude and antique contempt of death 
are still alive. Mr. John Jay Chapman, while in 
the act of putting in those life-touches which 
make his portrait of his son so vivid and so 
individual, would have us remember that Victor 
Chapman was only one brave man among many 
brave. " I have never regretted it for him," 
says a letter from Kiffin Rockwell, who was 
killed a little later, " as I know he was willing 
and satisfied to give his life that way if it was 
necessary, and that he had no fear of death, and 
there is nothing to fear in death." So these 
sailors of the air can speak, and so they feel. 
For them, as for those older sailors who took 
the Latin words for their motto, navigare 
necesse est, vivere non necesse. " II ne faut pas 
que l'univers s'arme pour l'ecraser," Pascal says 



Victor Chapman's Letters 243 

of man, in one of his most famous passages. 
" Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau suffit pour le 
tuer. Mais quand l'univers l'ecraserait, l'homme 
serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce 
qu'il sait qu'il meurt; et l'avantage que l'univers 
a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien." 
August, 1917. 



"THE SPIRIT OF MAN" 

ALTHOUGH we may nowadays treat the 
Golden Treasury too much like a common 
anthology, as if it were only a convenient place 
for meeting old friends, yet at one time or 
another we have all admired, some of us with- 
out help and some not until Matthew Arnold 
had shown us how to admire, the beautiful put- 
ting together of its pieces, the way in which 
many of them gain, from their setting among 
the right neighbors, something of color or mean- 
ing or sound. 

Those who perceive for themselves, or those 
who can perceive with assistance — which class 
do we belong to? "The Spirit of Man" will 
not help us to an answer, for in this new 
anthology, made by the poet laureate, Robert 
Bridges, and published a year ago, the arrange- 
ment is so winning that he must be a dull reader 
who can withstand its action. Perfection of 
arrangement was no doubt easier for Mr. 
Bridges to approach than for Palgrave. " The 
Spirit of Man " is not a collection "of the best 

244 



" The Spirit of Man " 245 

songs and lyrical poems in the English lan- 
guage." Its aim is to illustrate and support the 
belief " that spirituality is the basis and founda- 
tion of human life." Prose and verse in Eng- 
lish and French are admitted, and so are transla- 
tions from the Russian, from Greek and Latin, 
and things brought from the East. A purpose 
so much more special than Palgrave's gave Mr. 
Bridges material more homogeneous, less refrac- 
tory, not so hard to put in order. 

The success of his chosen order is obvious if 
we will read his book as he would have us read 
it, beginning at the beginning and going straight 
ahead. He leads us in all ease from mood to 
mood, takes us with him all the way, leaves us 
rested and bettered by the journey. His taste 
and art allow us to feel, for a short time and in 
the case of some of us perhaps for the last time, 
the beauty of those spiritual moods to which 
nowadays we do not rise by accident, nor yet by 
will, nor at all without the help of strong hands. 
I know that while I was reading his book the 
other day I had an illusion that I was growing 
physically lighter, that not only did my eyes look 
up through the clouds to serener spaces, but 
that I was carried gently upward to them, and 



246 Books and Things 

breathed for a while those brighter, purer and 
austerer airs where Mr. Bridges lives and is at 
home, nor ever suffers from mountain sickness. 
Great must be the persuasiveness of an anthol- 
ogy which can lift a heavy body to uncongenial 
spiritual heights. 

Coming down to earth again, later, I asked 
how it was that I, whose soul is no frequenter 
of the uplands, visiting them but seldom and 
never staying long, had been so submissive to 
Mr. Bridges. Why had I not been on guard 
against being exalted? Why had I not resisted 
this unfamiliar refining process? And the 
answer, when it came, came as a surprise. Mr. 
Bridges has printed the names of his authors 
at the end of his book. " It is true," he writes, 
" that very often we cannot fully understand a 
passage unless we know who wrote it ; on the 
other hand it is an idle and pernicious habit to 
ask for information on any question before 
bringing one's own judgment to bear upon it; 
and this book may even have a secondary use- 
fulness in providing material for the exercise of 
literary judgment, in those who. have any taste 
for the practice." This exercise in literary judg- 
ment, made possible because Mr. Bridges has 



" The Spirit of Man " 247 

printed nearly all his pieces without names, kept 
me from suspecting that I was growing too 
spiritual to be true. Vanity's strongest instinct 
is the instinct of self-preservation, but vanity 
also likes to run risks. Sometimes I tried to 
guess who wrote what I was reading, sometimes 
I tried only to guess the writer's epoch. My 
mistakes were many, as when I failed to give 
Thomas a Kempis his own, and could not put 
Marcus Aurelius near his right century. Most 
of all was I vexed when I ascribed to Pascal, of 
whom I judge as the good judges do, a piece 
written by Amiel, whom I like but feebly, believ- 
ing the good judges rate him too high. And in 
general I found, whenever I was certain of an 
author's name, that it was memory which made 
me certain, and not insight. 

Perhaps the spirituality in this book would 
seem too spiritual if one's attention were not 
taken off it by the exercise in literary judgment. 
At times the wish to attribute rightly is on top, 
and at times this disappears and one attends 
only to the wisdom or beauty or high mind of 
the written things. Thus a reader's attention, 
turning from this hand to that hand, keeps its 
strength without faltering, has even strength to 



248 Books and Things 

spare for a hundred and one details, for the 
skill with which the high color of Bacon or of 
Burke is placed so as not to seem out of har- 
mony with its quieter surroundings, for the con- 
trast, in Mr. Bridges's own subtly-rhythmed 
quantitative hexameters, between the pattern 
made by the quantities and the pattern made by 
the stressed syllables. Now the patterns coin- 
cide, now they have separated and each is trying 
to get possession of the listener's ear. Now we 
move with the stressed syllables against the 
stream of the quantities, now the stressed syl- 
lables and the long syllables are the same for a 
few feet, and what we hear is less complex and 
moves faster. Newer and more varied rhythms 
are given to the ear in the experiments Mr. 
Bridges has made in quantitative verse than in 
all the free verse I have read. 

Besides his hexameters from Virgil and 
Homer, Mr. Bridges has put into this book " a 
few half-original verse-translations," and a few 
of his improvements upon other translators' 
work. A study of these reworkings of older 
versions will delight anybody who likes to per- 
ceive, in these small and transforming touches, 
how small a change may make how great a dif- 



" The Spirit of Man " 249 

ference. But on the whole Mr. Bridges has 
feared too much " a perpetual temptation to 
quote from himself." I wish he had felt this 
temptation oftener. Here we have only one 
poem by Robert Bridges. I wish he had put in 
the last one in Book V of his " Shorter Poems," 
for I know of no poem, anywhere, that better 
expresses the final mood in which his anthology 
would leave us : 

Weep not to-day : why should this sadness be ? 
Learn in present fears 
To o'ermaster those tears 
That unhindered conquer thee. 

Think on thy past valour, thy future praise ; 
Up, sad heart, nor faint 
In ungracious complaint, 
Or a prayer for better days. 

Daily thy life shortens, the grave's dark peace 
Draweth surely nigh, 
When good-night is good-bye ; 
For the sleeping shall not cease. 

Fight, to be found fighting: nor far away 
Deem, nor strange thy doom. 
Like this sorrow 'twill come, 
And the day will be to-day. 

January, 1917, 



MY NEW ULSTER 

ALTHOUGH my ulster was what we used 
to call worn out, being a little ragged in 
spots and more than a little threadbare, and 
although it was almost ten years old, I did not 
easily bring myself to buy a new one. I was 
held back by pictures of the other things that 
could be bought for the same money, and of the 
men who needed these things. Nor was I quite 
uninfluenced by that decent respect for the 
opinions of mankind which some of us call fear. 
Several ready-made shops did I visit, trying on 
before mirrors of heroic size, conscientiously 
feeling different cloths, behaving in general like 
a man who thinks to hide his ignorance of wine 
by holding his glass of sherry against the light, 
testingly. Having thus persuaded myself, much 
of course against my will, that the better article 
is always cheaper than the cheaper, I went to 
my tailor's with a conscience nearly in the place 
where I had been trying to put it. 

Nearly, but not quite. The new ulster has a 
more " conspicuous plainness " than most of the 

250 



My New Ulster 251 

clothes I buy when nobody gives me sobering 
advice. It looks a little, now when I survey it 
with an unimpassioned eye, like a garment 
chosen by one who wished to escape notice. 
Now and then, wearing it carelessly before 
friends whom I judge to be good judges of such 
things, I have caught myself wondering whether 
the degree to which it has failed to attract their 
attention were not excessive. One of them, I 
am bound to say, did give that ulster the praise 
it deserves. Then he paused for a minute, ap- 
peared to calculate, and added: "It ought to 
last you half the rest of your life." 

• True, perhaps, but what is the use of remind- 
ing a man that he is mortal by such concrete 
illustrations? Their convincingness is their of- 
fense. If a friend must tell me that I am to die, 
if he cannot be happy until he has got this truth 
off his chest, let him say it in a jargon of abstract 
words, like senescence. Why poison my mind 
against a worthy ulster, which for days I shall 
not put on without reflecting that if you measure 
its length of life by that of its predecessors, and 
my length of life by that of mine, the next ulster 
I buy will probably be my last? In Paris once, 



252 Books and Things 

years ago now, I came suddenly on a shop which 
sold dix mille chemises. The thought that I 
could not live to wear so many made mortality 
seem real. 

What would my conduct be, I wonder, if in 
truth, and say for a week on end, I did imagine 
myself part of this earth's perishable freight? 
Set my house in order? Try to remember 
where I put my will? Number my days so that 
I might apply my heart unto wisdom? Of 
course, of course. But what else? "What," 
said Samuel Johnson, upon one of the many oc- 
casions when he thought of death, " what must 
be the condition of him whose heart will not 
suffer him to rank himself among the best, or 
among the good? Such must be his dread of the 
approaching trial, as will leave him little atten- 
tion to the opinion of those whom he is leaving 
forever." I do not believe I should partake of 
this feeling. The opinion of those whom I was 
leaving forever would matter a good deal. In 
one's last week on earth it would be pleasant 
to do something, not melodramatic or obviously 
staged, which would round off one's life with a 
quietly noble gesture, stop on the right note, 



My New Ulster 2^3 

look handsome in retrospect, be not misplaced 
on the front page. In practice, such gestures 
being difficult, I should doubtless content myself 
with removing one or two objects from my 
effects. This book, for example, in which I have 
written so many words, this must not fall under 
the eyes of my heirs. They would not read it, 
that is more than probable, but certainly they 
will not if I commit it, thus, to the flames. 
. . . There! . . . That is done. ... It 
burns . . . it is gone. 

It was far from a " roguish " book, of the kind 
which Mr. Samuel Pepys burned now and then, 
lest it be found in his library to shame him. It 
was only a blank book in which I had built, line 
upon line, page upon page, a monument to my 
unwisdom. There I had set down, beginning 
with August, 1914, what I believed about the 
var. I believed that the Germans would be 
.ought to a standstill somewhere in Belgium, 
that by their continued attacks in mass forma- 
tion they proved how little they had learned 
since 1871 about the art of war, that the German 
navy would be destroyed before August, 1915, 
that the strength of the Russian army would 



254 Books and Things 

bear against Germany with ever increasing 
weight, that the entrance of Rumania into the 
war would shorten it, that England had got the 
submarines under control. These and other 
opinions did I write down, and nearly every one 
of them wrong. 

The men who are running the war, who have 
to judge probability and to make decisions, these 
need all possible confidence in themselves. But 
I wish that everybody who does nothing for the 
war or to the war except to talk about it, and 
whose self-confidence needs impairment, had 
kept a book like mine and were forced to re-read 
it at short intervals. Alike from one's obvious 
mistakes and from one's monotonous consist- 
ency something might be learned, some self- 
distrust acquired. Early in the war my cousin 
Isabel became convinced that the Germans had 
committed atrocities. The war has convinced 
her of nothing else. She has been consistent, 
stationary, unexperiencing. 

Which minds have learned least in the last 
four years from the war, those which still feed 
on atrocities and give eager credence to every 
spy story, or those whose attitude was fixed 



My New Ulster 255 

once for all by their reaction against the ro- 
mantic illusion about war? For them the details 
of a soldier's life have an unchanging fascina- 
tion. Their attention is fixed upon the cold, the 
ruin, the mud, the vermin, the stenches. They 
see war as a field of putrid flesh, hear it as 
shrieks of agony, feel it as the human body into 
which a bayonet crashes or slips. They forget 
that the widespread, the almost universal cour- 
age which endures these things is greater than 
it would need to be if war were all glory and 
romance. The worse war is, the more horrible 
and futile, the more miraculous that greatness 
of spirit which has fought and fights on. 

Meanwhile I notice, in my friends and in 
myself, a feeling which is of no value to any- 
body, and which does not change except to 
grow deeper and to displace other feelings. 
Here we all are, safe, middle-aged, warmed, fed, 
clothed, harmlessly occupied. And over there 
the better bodies and better brains of younger 
men are being destroyed scientifically, day by 
day, at a rate that can almost be predicted. 
This contrast is already old, but always new to 
feel, week by week more unbearable, unthink- 



256 Books and Things 

able. Our feeling is more presentable than my 
cousin Isabel's monomania, but not more useful. 
In my case it produces only sill)' self-deceptions 
before spending money on myself. For I still 
believe I should not have bought that new over- 
coat if I hadn't lost the old one. 
January, 1918. 



ACTS OF COMPOSITION 

IN imagination I stand, some fine morning of 
next June, upon a platform slightly raised, 
where teachers are sitting, and even a few 
trustees. Ingratiatingly I look down upon a 
roomful of school-children who actually wish to 
listen. I see fifty or sixty expectant faces, 
washed and upturned, visibly waiting for the 
words that are to set them free. Not in vain 
are they eager. The words come. In accents 
of unfeigned sincerity I begin my lecture upon 
rhetoric, or the art, as in my own youth we were 
incited to call it, of efficient communication by 
language. 

Let us start, I tell my little hearers, with 
paragraphs. Years ago a revered teacher 
taught me that the first sentence of a well-made 
paragraph should discover a subject and that 
the last sentence should drive a conclusion 
home. For months I struggled to satisfy this 
idea of paragraph structure, without ever get- 
ting even so far as to learn with what material 
one should fill the space between these limitary 

257 



258 Books and Things 

sentences, the announcer and the summer-up. 
Many paragraphs by many masters did I pull 
to pieces, finding about ten that did not con- 
form to this ideal pattern for every one that did. 
So I banished the ideal, renounced the teacher, 
forgot his advice until only the other day, when 
I read in the editor's prefatory note to " The 
Middle Years " that Henry James usually put off 
the markings of his paragraphs until the final 
revision of a book. Why should he have done 
otherwise? The paragraph was invented for 
the convenience of readers, as an ex post facto 
sign that one of the writer's impulses had spent 
itself, or was about to change cars. To most 
men dreams do not come in paragraphs, nor 
day-dreamt hallucinations, nor confessions of 
faith, nor declarations of love. If you keep con- 
sciously aiming to write paragraphs you risk 
contracting the habit of trying to see the world 
in paragraphs, a sad preventive of the better 
habit of trying to see. Paragraph structure, so 
I end this part of my lecture, isn't anything to 
worry about. 

Transition, or the art of getting from this 
paragraph to that, is another thing that the 
writer must put clean out of his head. If he 



Acts of Composition 259 

does not, if he remains a slave of transition, he 
will pester his reader with obtruded connectives, 
with at the same times, with on the other 
hands, with thens flanked by commas and aca- 
demically sticking out. At its worst transition 
is a long way round from something you have 
been saying — to something you mean to say — 
through something better left unsaid. Poem, 
essay, chapter, argument — too much attention 
to transition will make any one of these resem- 
ble John Florian's dinners, at which the last 
mouthful of every course except coffee tasted 
a little like the first mouthful of the next. 

About clearness, force and ease I make only 
two remarks, both striking. I invite my audience 
to inquire whether " The Faery Queen " would 
have been better, in any sense that any sane 
person could give the word, if Spenser had tried 
for force; whether by trying for ease Browning 
would have bettered " Childe Roland to the Dark 
Tower Came; " whether " The Listeners " could 
have kept its charm if Mr. de la Mare had made 
it as clear as " What Does Little Birdie Say." No 
writer, I add, nobody whom anybody would 
think of calling a writer, ever bothers his head 
about ease or force when he is performing that 



260 Books and Things 

one of the many acts of composition which con- 
sists in putting words together into a sentence. 
Clearness is in a different category. But not 
even clearness need be the conscious concern of 
any one while he is writing. A writer almost 
never tells himself he must be clear. What he 
says to himself is " That isn't what I mean " — 
" That's not what I'm after "— " I can't let it go 
like that." The impulse which he acts on when 
he rewrites an obscure sentence is very like the 
impulse which takes you out of your chair and 
across the room in order to straighten a picture 
that hangs crooked. 

The act of composition, as some people still call 
it, is neither single nor distinct. It is all the 
acts of experiencing and remembering and in- 
venting and translating into words. Learning 
to translate into words is the act of adding both 
unconsciously and also consciously to the num- 
ber of things you can unconsciously do. It is 
like learning to play a game, except that no 
learner of any game has ever to be on his guard 
against excess of either conscious or uncon- 
scious imitation. But even in writing, if you have 
a voice of your own, your fear of imitating too 
closely is controlled by your certitude that you 



Acts of Composition 261 

cannot imitate successfully, and that through imi- 
tation you become free. Qui apicem gessisti, 
mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos 
fama virtusque, gloria atque ingenium. Try to 
copy into English not the total effect of this 
inscription on a Roman tomb, but the effect of 
its m's and n's, the salience of its three ia's, its 
vowel sounds in their order, the funeral march 
of its clauses. By consciously trying to imitate 
you learn to do unconsciously, when the right 
matter and the right mood come together and 
join hands, something you would have written 
differently but for the imitative exercises you 
have forgotten. 

Most of the too few painters I know talk 
easily enough, but when one of them is talking 
to another I notice how he often hesitates, not 
for a word but for a memory. His eye is wait- 
ing until it sees with the needed degree of dis- 
tinctness the color or the form of the thing he 
is talking about. So a writer will often stop, 
hesitate, hang back until memory has brought 
his subject into the field of vision, where he will 
hold this subject until his remembering eye has 
seen what he was looking for, concretely, in 
its haecceity, and the words he was after come 



262 Books and Things 

of themselves to his pen. They will not be the 
words that would have come if he had not made 
this effort to remember. To the good memory, 
the memory that can command things seen, 
heard, felt or understood, comes the phrase that 
nobody ever thought of before, in its fresh 
exactness. 

Out of memory, by a hand whose sensitive- 
ness experiment has refined, whose strength 
experiment has made stronger — such is the 
pedigree of much good writing. To say this, 
however, is to refer to those two only of the 
acts composing the act of composition in which 
self-improvement is a possible thing. A rich 
experience to remember, that power to remake 
remembered experience which we call invention, 
are at no one's command. They depend, I sup- 
pose, upon a writer's physiological equipment. 
But anybody may choose to write about what he 
remembers most sharply. Anybody may in- 
crease the faithfulness of his words to remem- 
bered things. 

With these words of temperate hope I bring 
my lecture to a close. Its effect is not quite 
what I anticipated. No teacher threatens to 
assault me in reprisal for my derogatory re- 



Acts of Composition 263 

marks about clearness, force and ease. The 
children do not crowd about the platform saying 
things which lead me to exclaim, with a well- 
rehearsed involuntary air, " I am glad you asked 
me that question." Well, it doesn't matter. 
Better luck next time. And, anyway, I have 
made my train without having had to tell any- 
body that I stole my Latin inscription from Mr. 
Mackail's wise and beautiful introduction to his 
" Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology." 
March, 1918. 



FORGET IT 

TO make the last three months intelligible 
I must go back further than that. One 
little year ago I was almost happy. Nearly all 
the members of my family had become inured 
to my presence in the home. My friends never 
showed, and I believe seldom felt, discomfort 
when I accepted their invitations. Acquaint- 
ances would smile cheerily when we met on the 
street. Now and then one among them would 
stop of his own accord and pass the time of 
day. In my quiet way I was, in short, a popular 
man. 

Not quite a year ago an acute observer might 
have detected, here a little and there a little 
more, signs of change. That acute observer was 
not I. The first step on the downhill road was 
taken when I bought a magazine, the second in 
several years, and read an advertisement. It 
told how Mr. Smith, whose memory had been 
so defective that he could not recall the names 
of his children by his first wife, or the address 

264 



Forget It 265 

to which he was expected to send the alimony 
check, now could and did tell such of his seven- 
teen thousand acquaintances as came his way 
their telephone numbers and middle names. I 
took the memory training lessons by which Mr. 
Smith had profited so strangely. Next I read 
an advertisement which narrated the methodical 
saturation of Mr. Jones in general information. 
A quarter of an hour a day was turning him into 
a well posted and therefore brilliant conversa- 
tionalist. I took that course too. I made myself 
a lord of miscellaneous knowledge. No doubt 
you can guess the next and last step. You can 
see me, after but a few months devoted to train- 
ing my will by mail, a changed man, an aggres- 
sive character, a dominating personality. 

Now I am not yet prepared to admit that any 
one of these three disciplines, taken singly, 
would have wrecked my life. Perhaps even the 
three together would not have shattered my 
happiness if I had not been such a forward 
pupil, which is what each of my teachers as- 
sured me, by mail, that I was. Be these things 
as they may, the great fact remains : Last June, 
when I, the finished product of all this training, 
burst upon the world, confidently, optimistically, 



266 Books and Things 

the world did as it always does when things 
burst. It ran for cover. 

By the way, I ought at this point, in fairness 
to the advertisements which I accuse of my 
undoing, to say that they kept many of their 
promises. They turned me from nobody into 
somebody. My improved memory was of im- 
mense utility in my office, where works of ref- 
erence fell into disuse as soon as my employer 
had tired of the pastime of consulting them to 
verify what I said. Of what service were they 
when it was so much quicker for anybody who 
wanted to know the duty on cocoa matting in 
the tariff of 1884, whether it was hemp or wool 
that ought to be wet-rotted, scutched and 
hackled, whether Kosciuszko shrieked as Free- 
dom fell, or the other way round, to ask me? 
An ability to remember things like these has a 
cash value. Combined with my new dominat- 
ingly aggressive will it raised my salary to 
eighteen thousand a year. 

That is the good side of my case, and would 
that my case had been one-sided ! But it wasn't. 
Beyond the walls of my office, where I united 
the merits of a work of reference and of an 
irresistible force, there was a different story to 



Forget It 267 

tell. My acquaintances began to behave them- 
selves oddly. They seemed always to be hur- 
rying to important engagements. Friends, what 
you would really call friends, ceased to be. My 
wife took to accepting an improbable number of 
invitations in which I was not included, and I 
have reason to believe that when invitations 
were lacking she would sometimes dine alone 
at her modest club. My children escaped me by 
marrying, hastily, people they hardly knew. 

From June until near the end of September 
my way of life led me from solitude to solitude, 
from hell to hell. In September, at the request 
of friends who used to be mine and had become 
my wife's, I first heard of Dr. Lugweed. His 
mere waiting-room made an immediate impres- 
sion. Its literature was obviously modern. 
There was a profuse supply of pamphlets, by 
which I was astonished, puzzled and thrilled. 
Here indeed were the sources of hope — What to 
Forget and How; The Lost Is Found, or Inhibi- 
tions Regained; The Abortion of Anecdotes. I 
entered Dr. Lugweed's private office with a 
beating heart and shining eyes. 

The doctor did not disappoint the expecta- 
tions his ante-room had raised. Without a sign 



268 Books and Things 

of patience he listened to my sad story. When 
at last I had finished he said: " Your case is not 
uncommon, although exceptionally grave. Its 
gravity, of which you do not appear to be fully 
aware, you have revealed by many signs, of 
which I select but one to notice. While sitting 
here, consulting a busy and by no means inex- 
pensive physician, you have seen fit to tell him 
the population of Sandusky in 1910, the relation 
of James I of England to Henry VIII, and the 
mean height of the Vale of Kashmir above sea- 
level. Yes, your case is grave. But I do not 
despair of curing you if you will consent to be- 
come an inmate of my sanitarium for three 
months." 

Into the details of those three months, which 
began with October, I shall not go. Suffice it 
to say that Dr. Lugweed, after testing and 
observing me for a week, took a more hopeful 
view of my case than I had given him at our 
first encounter. His method is to impair the 
memory, to strengthen the suppressing and re- 
pressing will, or to do both at once. It was 
method number two that he essayed with me. 
" By this method," he said, " the battle is 
harder, but the victory, if won at all, is decisive. 



Forget It 269 

Your will to impart miscellaneous information 
has been wonderfully trained, wonderfully. Per- 
haps we shall overcome it by training the will 
to keep miscellaneous information to yourself, 
where it belongs. Should this effort fail we'll 
try to bring your memory down to normal." 

Well, here I am, after three months of inten- 
sive treatment, cured, healed, capable of speak- 
ing without putting everybody within sound of 
my voice to flight. It would be unfair to Dr. 
Lugweed, whom I have had the happy thought 
of addressing as " Master," to reveal his secret, 
but there is, I believe, no harm in recording 
fragments of his talk. " Aim high," he said one 
day. " I had a friend once who had taken all 
knowledge to be his province, and who went 
through life silent, for fear of talking shop. 
Keep him in mind." And on another occasion, 
in a less earnest mood, he let fall this: "Here 
is the paradox of social intercourse : Although 
the best companion is not he who says nothing, 
the good companion is known by what he omits 
to say." And on a third occasion, laconically: 
" Few are they who can endure the society of 
a well informed man." I owe much, moreover, 
perhaps more than I can hope to express in 



270 Books and Things 

words, to a booklet called " Teach Me Rather to 
Forget," written by Dr. Lugweed himself. Al- 
though designed peculiarly for patients who are 
taking the memory-weakening course, the open- 
ing pages of this tract have a meaning for me, 
possibly for us all : " ' That reminds me,' says 
my memory. ' I mustn't say it,' says my love 
of my neighbor. And in the end, which is not 
far from the beginning, my love of neighbor 
yields to my memory, I open my mouth and 
off I go." 
January, 1919. 



" LE PETIT PIERRE " 

REVERENCE lessens with the years, and 
the habit of visiting holy places loses its 
sway, yet it was not in youth, it was when I 
was well over thirty, that I found myself one 
autumn morning in that short street of low 
houses, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, 
which is now named the Villa Said and 
which will some day be named after Anatole 
France. 

Look, my friend had told me, not remember- 
ing the number, look for the house with an old 
man's head for a knocker or doorbell, a head 
made of old Florentine bronze. As long as I 
dared I stood not far from this door, hoping 
M. Anatole France would come out or at least 
show his face at a window. He did not appear. 
Perhaps he did not know that a stranger before 
his gate was asking only one thing more to be 
grateful for, a glimpse of him in his own city 
and street. Perhaps he knew and did not care. 
Perhaps he was away from Paris in some Italian 
town, bending over a drawing or an old coin, 

271 



272 Books and Things 

lifting his head now and then to look across 
gardens at some line made by the hills. How- 
ever this may have been, I had to take myself 
off at last without seeing the writer whose books 
have charmed, as no one else's have charmed, 
all the middle years of my life. 

When he wrote " Le Livre de mon ami " he 
was, as he has told us, " nel mezzo del cammin di 
nostra vita." Now, when he is nearer the end of 
that way, he gives us a third book of his child- 
hood, " Le Petit Pierre." The thirty years be- 
tween the two books have brought him friends 
and enmities, a clear fame through Europe and 
in the Americas, the promise of an immortality 
in which one hopes even he must believe, who 
believes so little. These years have not left his 
childhood further behind. To represent time as 
going by and increasing distances has never 
been one of his gifts. The space between the 
thing seen and the seer is always about the 
same. Le Chanteur de Kyme is as near us as 
Le Procurateur de Judee, Monsieur Bergeret 
hardly any nearer than l'Abbe Jerome Coignard, 
although each is set with light certainty among 
the ideas, the customs, the visible world of his 
own present, whether ours or not. 



" Le Petit Pierre" 273 

Not that Anatole France, who has lived for 
so many years at the same distance from his 
childhood, is unconscious of growing older. In 
" Le Petit Pierre," after some of the loveliest, 
most touching words ever written by one man of 
Latin genius about another, he stops and says : 
" Je ne veux pas mourir sans avoir ecrit quelques 
lignes au pied de votre monument, 6 Jean 
Racine, en temoignage de mon amour et de ma 
piete. Et si je n'ai pas le temps d'accomplir ce 
devoir sacre, que ces lignes negligees, mais 
sinceres, me servent de testament." Has old 
age done anything to his genius beyond lessen- 
ing the number of years in which he can give 
us new tokens of it? Very little. Perhaps " Le 
Petit Pierre " brings back no day quite " so cool, 
so calm, so bright " as the day when Pierre's 
mother, in " Le Livre de mon ami," picking him 
up in her arms and marking with her bodkin 
a rosebud on the wall of the petit salon, says to 
him : " Je te donne cette rose." There may be 
a freshness nearer daybreak on the pages of the 
older book, an earlier light. The new book is 
the richer. " Je dirai done," — Anatole France 
wrote long ago in " Le Jardin d'Epicure," " je 
dirai done que, s'il n'y a pas proprement de style 



274 Books and Things 

simple, il y a des styles qui paraissent simples, 
et que c'est precisement a ceux-la que semblent 
attaches la jeunesse et la duree. II ne reste plus 
qu'a rechercher d'ou leur vient cette apparence 
heureuse. Et Ton pensera sans doute qu'ils la 
doivent, non pas a ce qu'ils sont moins riches 
que les autres en elements divers, mais bien a 
ce qu'ils forment un ensemble cm toutes les 
parties sont si bien fondues qu'on ne les dis- 
tingue plus." No one has given a better descrip- 
tion of Anatole France's own prose, so like itself 
always in its apparent simplicity, so changing 
in the richness of its diverse elements. With 
what directness he can say, of the avaricious and 
prosperous landlord in " Le Petit Pierre: " " On 
ne lui en voulait pas d'etre grand menager de 
son bien, et peut-etre Ten estimait-on davan- 
tage. Ce que Ton considere chez les riches, c'est 
leur richesse." Read the story of Uncle Hya- 
cinthe and of the triumph in which he had him- 
self carried, across thirty barricades in the 
streets of Paris, disguised as a wounded hero, 
safe to his mistress's house, and she a laundress. 
Labiche would have laughed aloud at the story. 
Or read the anecdote of Caire, the dog with a 
sense of the comic — a caricature that Mark 



" he Petit Pierre" 2J$ 

Twain might have written, if he had been born 
long enough ago, and in Tanagra. 

Conscientious critics will find in " Le Petit 
Pierre," have already found, no doubt, what 
they call Anatole France's shortcomings. But 
critics ought not to be conscientious. What do 
those conscientious Frenchmen mean who say 
he is impassive? I have no idea. Has any one 
in any age been more sensitive to the difference 
between ugliness and beauty, between ignoble- 
ness and generosity, between hardness and gen- 
tleness of heart? For him these three are the 
same difference. Nor do I know the worth of 
the complaint, made by M. Andre Gide, for 
example, that he can be understood as well at 
the first as at any later reading, that he is too 
readily intelligible, clear even at first sight. 
One might say as much of Homer's " clearness 
without shadow or stain, clearness divine." Of 
course the pleasure one takes in jewels cut and 
set is unlike the pleasure of hunting for them 
in African river-beds. The bearing of M. Gide's 
criticism must I suppose depend upon what one 
means by "understand." Anatole France has 
to be sure a clearness no one can miss his way 
in, even at first, but this clearness is not all. 



276 Books and Things 

All he has, all he is — this no one can know who 
has not lived long in the Ile-de-France, who is 
not in love with its looks and its ways. A 
Frenchman, one who loves French literature 
and whose ear is nice, he and no one else can 
hear all the echoes in Anatole France's prose, 
echoes repeated in a voice subtly new, of Marot 
and Montaigne, so they say, of Racine and of 
La Fontaine, of La Bruyere and Voltaire. Even 
among Frenchmen such readers are not many, 
and fewer still must be his perfect readers, who 
can distinguish all the other elements his art 
has " si bien fondu qu'on ne les distingue 
plus." 

When one is trying to use a writer's short- 
comings so as to define his genius one must stick 
to his relevant shortcomings, to those that one 
notices while reading, as things that lessen one's 
pleasure. Of these Anatole France has, so far 
as I am concerned, exactly three. A learning 
which sometimes interests the writer more than 
the reader — there is no trace of this in " Le Petit 
Pierre," where I do notice, however, that Pierre 
at birth and Pierre at ten years old seem a little 
disconcertingly of the same age. Except in the 
case of myth, as in " Putois," Anatole France has 



" Le Petit Pierre" 277 

always taken a more attentive interest in being 
than in becoming. Far away in every imagina- 
tive writer is the obscure seat of his greater 
inclination to things as they are or to the 
process by which they have become what they 
are, of his choice between representing the 
flowers of life and representing their growing. 
Artists who are fascinated by the way in which 
imperceptible changes work the changes that all 
may see — it is among these that we find the 
masters of composition, the makers of organic 
wholes. Few goldsmiths are designers in the 
large. Anatole France is not. None of his beau- 
tifully ordered books has a deeper order than 
that of time, a deeper unity than that of texture 
and tone, any unity except in its author's feeling 
and thought. 

This is obvious enough, but do I after all feel 
its truth at any moment of reading? Not often. 
What I notice oftenest as a diminisher of my 
joy, as a breaker of his spell, is the frequency 
with which he remembers that he is a disciple 
of Pyrrho, who taught that all things are equally 
uncertain, that nothing can be known. Yes, I 
could wish the explicit expressions of this 
skepticism fewer in Anatole France, where they 



278 Books and Things 

come at last to seem like self-indulgence in a 
habit, like compliance with a convention adopted 
years ago and never again looked at closely. To 
repeat the same gesture of doubt, even if a new 
grace freshens each repetition, is to do less than 
justice to a real intricacy in things. The dif- 
ference between ignorance and learning our ut- 
most may be as interesting as the difference 
between this utmost and absolute knowledge, 
and to be unaware of either difference is to see 
too few planes in the landscape life flows 
through. His skepticism, however, although 
when precipitated it tends to obliterate distinc- 
tions worth retaining, does no more when in a 
state of suspension than lightly to azure the 
atmosphere which envelops all his men and 
women, and in which each is free to keep his 
bodily and moral uniqueness. Anatole France 
sees them, these men and women, with caressing 
and negligent precision. He sees at the same 
instant their two motions, their common fatal 
drift downstream, down a river nobody knows 
the source of and ending or never ending in 
nobody knows what sea, and also the motion 
given to each by his private wishes. In sen- 
tences which lie more lightly on their page 



" Le Petit Pierre" 279 

than anybody else's he passes his judgment of 
value upon each of his creatures and of God's. 
These judgments are never explicit. He lets 
us know them indirectly, by varying the pro- 
portion of pity to derision, of affection to 
mockery, in his feeling toward each of the men 
and women in his books. His hand has taught 
elegance and measure to delineate with the last 
sharpness, his grotesques and gargoyles even 
being as expressive as his loveliest landscapes 
of his preference for classic art; but the finest 
of all the instruments he works with upon hu- 
man nature is this derisive sense of tears in 
mortal things. Never, we say at one moment, 
was a sense of mankind's absurdity expressed 
more tenderly, and never, we say again, did 
affection etch such comic figures. His prefer- 
ence among men and women is for simple and 
candid souls. These are sometimes learned and 
meditative, sometimes ignorant dwellers in 
bodies the laborious years have worn and 
twisted. Among thoughts he distrusts those 
that are built upon other thoughts, preferring, 
as likely to be more lifelike and less vain, the 
thoughts which memory and the senses bring, 
and his own profoundest thoughts come to him 



280 Books and Things 

not at the end of a train of reasoning, but as 
immediately and easily as his simplest. 

Perfect readers of Anatole France are rare, 
as I have said. Sometimes I wonder whether 
they exist, for they must have taken part in 
all the migrations of his soul, must have lived 
in all its traditions. It is a large order. He was 
born on an Ionian island, has looked long at 
reliefs on Greek temples, has listened to Attic 
words and to Alexandrine. He has spent a 
lifetime in Middle Age monasteries, has pored 
upon the ingenuities of theologians and the 
lives of the saints, understanding with friendly 
incredulity the thirst of those passionate hearts 
at rest now, which once panted after miracle and 
dogma. He has lingered over the violence and 
learning of the Renaissance, its superb and 
cruel joy of living, its medals and painting and 
smaller bronzes. He has been at home in oldest 
and in eighteenth-century France, although 
Racine is the Frenchman he loves best. In the 
France of yesterday he has been an exile and 
suddenly a soldier with a sharp sword. Never 
did gentleness make cleaner wounds. 

It is years ago now that Anatole France 
looked out of his window, watched the crowds 



"Le Petit Pierre" 281 

going along the quais that border the Seine, 
saw them as the posterity of the great French 
writers, and thought the chance slight of their 
appreciating these masters with justice. I have 
a little more faith in the men and women of 
the future, in the posterity of Anatole France. 
With imperfect understanding and a stumbling 
tongue one of these will say to him, upon put- 
ting down one of his books a few hundred years 
hence: "Your eyes saw at the same instant, and 
your mind often recorded in two adjectives, no 
further than a conjunction apart, those contra- 
dictory aspects of man which most of us can 
see only by making a long journey from one per- 
ception to the other. Your words keep all their 
beauty, your sentences are refined gold, you 
are wise in all times, your place in our hearts 
is certain; and since, having had it so long, it 
is impossible you should ever lose it, our debt 
of gratitude must rest unpaid for ever and ever." 
Or if, dissatisfied with his own words, as he 
well may be, he looks elsewhere for better words 
of praise and gratitude, he will not have to look 
long. Anatole France has described again and 
again, most of all when least thinking of him- 
self, when looking at the clear and delicate lines 



282 Books and Things 

of some landscape that he loves, the impression 
left by his books. Which of these landscapes 
shall we choose, from Egypt, from Ionia, Italy 
or France? You remember how Therese, in " Le 
Lys Rouge," leans on the balustrade at Fiesole, 
breathes the spring air and looks at Florence, 
and you remember what is said to her: 
" Regardez, regardez encore, ce que vous voyez 
est unique au monde. Nulle part la nature n'est 
a ce point subtile, elegante et fine. Le dieu qui 
fit les collines de Florence etait artiste. Oh!, il 
etait joaillier, graveur en medailles, sculpteur, 
fondeur en bronze et peintre; c'etait un Flor- 
entin. II n'a fait que cela au monde. Le reste 
est d'une main moins delicate, d'un travail 
moins parfait. Comment voulez-vous que cette 
colline violette de San Miniato, d'un relief si 
ferme et si pur, soit de l'auteur du Mont Blanc? 
Ce n'est pas possible. Ce paysage a la beaute 
d'une medaille ancienne et d'une peinture pre- 
cieuse. II est une parfaite et mesuree oeuvre 
d'art." 

Anatole France has long been attached to the 
belief that wherever our eyes may fall we see 
only ourselves, and never has he seen himself 
in a clearer light than when, thinking only of 



" Le Petit Pierre " 283 

Florence, he wrote these lines, although they 
give us no idea of the fighter that he has been, 
no idea of that kindly derision which is too hon- 
est to disappear at the sight of goodness, and 
which nothing but beauty has made him forget. 



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